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BOOKS BY GEORGE H; CALVERT. 

♦ 

WORDSWORTH. An Esthetic Biographic Study. With 
fine portrait $i-5o 

SHAKESPEARE. An Esthetic and Biographic Study. 

With a fine portrait ., 1.50 

THE NATION'S BIRTH, and other National Poems. 

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LEE & SHEPARD, PUBLISHERS, BOSTON. 



SHAKESPEARE 



A BIOGRAPHIC ESTHETIC STUDY 



BY 



,--^'>i 



GEORGE H. CALVERT 



OF C 




18T9. ^y> 



BOSTON 

LEE AND SHEPARD, PUBLISHERS 

NEW YORK 

CHARLES T. DILLINGHAM 

1879 






Copyright, 1879, 
By GEORGE H. CALVERT. 



RivERSiDK, Cambridge: 

STEREOTYPED AND PRINTED I?V 
H. O. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY. 



SHAKESPEARE. 



TO SHAKESPEARE. 

Effulgent Presence, who dost ceaseless shine 
Unbodied benefaction on the blest, — 
Thy lifted myriad-millions, aye possest 
Of that wide speech, in whose unwearied mine 
Thou art the richest vein, — phrases of thine, 
The largest, most embossed, the fiery best. 
He needs who, cheered by gratitude, would crest 
His love and awe with epithets so fine 
They shall exhale some flavor of thy worth, 
A fraction speak of what men owe to thee. 
Thou lonely one, at whose still modest birth 
Were born new worlds of truth and ecstasy, 
Thou great emblazoner of man and earth, 
Thou secret-holder of humanity. 



CONTENTS. 



-♦- 



PAGE 

I. First Decades .9 

II. Ripeness . . . . . . .56 

III. King John 123 

IV. Hamlet 152 



SHAKESPEARE. 
♦ 

I. 

First Decades. 

In Stratford on Avon, a small town of War- 
wickshire, England, in a small room of a cot- 
tage on Henley Street, lay, in the summer of 
1564, a babe asleep in his cradle. Beside the 
cradle sat a young woman, with broad, open 
brow and large hazel eyes, that were a light to 
clear symmetrical features. This woman was 
Mary Arden, wife of John Shakespeare, and, 
three months before, the babe had been chris- 
tened William Shakespeare. 

Evenly came the breathings of the infant ; 
his forehead was cool, and his cheeks, flushed 
by the healthy currents from his heart, glis- 
tened with the warmth of the midsummer noon. 
But the clear countenance of his mother, as 
she gazed on her beautiful boy, instead of being 
arrayed in the joy of such a possession, her 
eyes beaming with deepest and sweetest mater- 



10 SHAKESPEARE. 

nal gladness, was shadowed with alarm. The 
thought that their little angels may be suddenly- 
snatched from them back to heaven is common 
to all mothers, and the deeper the motherly 
tenderness the more biting is the thought. 
But the mist of such conceits, quickly routed 
by the morning glow of love, makes but a flit- 
ting shadow. The shadow on the brow of Mary 
Shakespeare was not flitting ; it passed not 
away, and at times was deepened by some in- 
ward motion. It was a wave from the general 
gloom that hung over the little town of Strat- 
ford. The plague had shown there its hid- 
eous skeleton. 

Nature can afford to be a spendthrift, allow- 
ing myriads of young lives to be wasted, so 
teeming is shd with new births, so deep her 
store of mysterious life-germs. But does she 
allow any of her capital buds to be cut off in 
infancy } When among the survivors (who are 
a vast majority) we find so few prime men, men 
of creative calibre, great poets, thinkers, dis- 
coverers, statesmen ; when we remember that 
during the long Napoleonic wars but two gen- 
erals earned the first rank as masters of their 
craft. Napoleon and Wellington ; when we re- 
flect how rare are Cavours and Washingtons, 



FIRST DECADES. 1 1 

how difficult it continues to be for us to find a 
man emir^ently suited to be the head of our 
republic, — a man able and just, watchful and 
scrupulous, temperate and energetic ; when we 
behold everywhere this dearth of high gifts, 
may we not conclude that few, if any, infants 
of best promise are sacrificed at the threshold 
of life, and that probably the native excellence 
of such involves a self-protecting vitality to re- 
sist physical destruction ? 

The air inbreathed by the infant that lay 
asleep near his anxious mother was feeding a 
brain destined to be the seat of a deeper and 
fuller consciousness than ever quickened a 
human mind. If the vitality through which the 
soul indues itself with corporeal consistence be 
not strong enough to insure the material form 
against earthly disease, a soul of this excep- 
tional power, as a resplendent boon from the 
soul of souls, will be shielded from above, 
and the modest cottage in Henley Street would 
have been encircled with a sanitary belt of 
guardian angels. 

Much as the earliest years of human life may 
deserve to be called, what Alfieri-in his auto- 
biography calls them, " an unintelligent vegeta- 
tion," still one catches at any fact about a great 



12 SHAKESPEARE. 

man, authentically reported, out of that period ; 
and the more luminous his nature the more 
welcome the fact, as in such a nature an in- 
fantile incident or speech would, we fancy, be 
the more significant. St. Augustine tells us 
that when an infant he laughed in his sleep. 
To take this as prophetic of the man Augus- 
tine, we should have to reckon by contraries, 
and thus to surmise that the infant Shake- 
speare (the man Shakespeare, in the propor- 
tions of his mental build, being the opposite 
of Augustine) might have wept in his sleep. 
About Goethe, that is a very significant state- 
ment that in his second or third year he cried 
at the sight of an ugly child, would not bear 
its presence, and had to be carried home. 

From Shakespeare's prattling years no inci- 
dents have come down to us. Some sparkling 
ones, no doubt, there were ; for from a central 
soul of such fiery force that it was to blaze into 
flames, to be forever a joy and warmth for his 
fellows, there must early have shot forth rays 
and jets significant and prophetic. But Shake- 
speare kept no diary and wrote no autobiogra- 
phy. He seems to have been without egotism. 
This we infer partly from the obj ectivity of his 
poetry, — but that appears to have been a 



FIRST DECADES. 1 3 

characteristic of his age, unhke herein to the 
age of Wordsworth and Byron. Alfieri, at the 
opening of his autobiography, confesses that 
what moves him to write his life, " among other 
feehngs, but more imperious than any other, 
is the love of myself." Is not a little too much 
prominence here given to the pivotal feeling 
in human nature } and would it not have been 
truer to say of Alfieri's autobiography, as of 
St. Augustine's, — ■ so different from it, and yet 
so similar in the depreciation of human nature, 
and also of Goethe's, so different from both, — 
that a love of self, not in these cases an unbe- 
coming selfish love, combined with a love of 
their readers, had been the moving spring of 
their pens ? A writer whose books have been 
read and liked by the best educated readers is 
justified in believing that a book about himself 
will be acceptable and instructive ; as it cer- 
tainly will be, if the writer is a large-minded, 
honest man. No more instructive, enduring 
volumes than these three autobiographies are 
found on library shelves. 

The gift of self-love, Alfieri says, has been 
lavished upon writers, especially poets. To 
Shakespeare's non-egotism we owe, I think, 
some of his efficiency and range as poet. Too 



14 SHAKESPEARE. 

much self-satisfaction opens the eyes ungrace^ 
fully wide to one's own merits, and dulls their 
vision to the merits of others, and thus ob- 
structs the avenues of the finer sympathies, 
closing the heart to nourishing admirations. 
Looks persistently turned inward self-compla- 
cently lose some of their curiosity towards 
abounding prospects and people about them. 
Self-esteem easily becomes a veil that dims for 
us our neighbors as well as distant things, and 
at the same time hides us from ourselves. To 
get out of and away from the little self is the 
best act a man can perform : it was one that 
Shakespeare performed often, and with im- 
mense results. 

But if from Shakespeare's childhood no word 
or fact has come" down to us, we have of his 
manhood the fullest, richest, truest, of autobi- 
ographies in his mighty works. x\nd, after 
all, the incidents or sayings reported about 
great men in their childhood are neither many 
nor always expressive. Possibly, the most 
characteristic mental movements are internal, 
and make no outward sign, — sudden glows 
that swell the mind beyond its yet narrow com- 
pass, electric shootings in the brain,, premature 
glimpses, flashing forerunners of rare manly 



FIRST DECADES. 1$ 

performance. Nevertheless, such is our inti- 
macy with Shakespeare, our reverence for him 
is so profound, our love so personal, that we 
cannot but hang about his infancy and child- 
hood. Aye, and we know as much about him 
as we do about other children ; for in their joy 
of growth and sweet dependence, which is their 
whole life, nature makes them all alike. Do we 
not know that his mother carried little William 
every day in her arms, that great mother, the 
mother of Shakespeare .? " In our mind's eye " 
we can easily see him there, and see his father 
come in smihng to refresh himself at his lively 
child. Mary and John gaze at him in speech- 
less content ; and may we not fancy parental 
partiality — a deep human feeling — mounting 
to mysterious, vague presentiment of his great- 
ness, a momentary breath of consciousness of 
what a wonder they had given to the world } 
The babe in Mary s lap, and John looking on, 
to our exalted imagination they present them- 
selves as a second holy family, becoming trans- 
figured, with a halo round their heads. 

We know, moreover, what Stratford was, — 
a small rural town in the very centre of Eng- 
land, open to fields and meadows, with the 
Avon gliding by. We know that brooks and 



1 6 ' SHAKESPEARE. 

rivulets, — resorts and playmates so dear to 
children — ran into the Avon ; that near and 
about it were woods and hills, copses and val- 
leys, humble cottages, halls, and lordly castles ; 
and all this in temperate England, where sum- 
mer is kind and winter never cruel. What a 
nursery for a poet-boy, and what a boy to romp 
in such a nursery ! Hear his birds sing, not in 
the leafy ^MTi^\{vsi^ oi Midsummer-Night' s Dream 
and As You Like It merely, but soothing the 
cavernous gloom of Hamlet and Macbeth. Their 
melody is the echo of what the boy heard in 
the fields and woods about Stratford.- And 
when, after roving for half a day through the 
green and wooded country, he parted from his 
little comrades in the centre of the town, and 
went home, that home was not a spacious, super- 
fluously furnished mansion, where, in the very 
vestibule, he would be met by luxury, greeting 
him in the shape of a gilded angel with soft 
smiles and caressing looks, and who, hypocrit- 
ical demon instead of angel, would hourly fil- 
ter poison into his soul through looks and touch 
and spiced meats. Nor had he to steal off to- 
wards a slatternly hovel, where penury gnaws 
into the vitals of childhood with not less fatal 
consequences to after-manhood than luxury. 



FIRST DECADES. 1/ 

But he cheerfully opened the door of a modest 
abode, small but tidy, where there was comfort 
and plain food, and some of the refinements of 
an age when refinements had not yet begun to 
be infinitely multiplied. We do know, — and 
it is much to know, — that Shakespeare's child- 
hood was healthily natural, not tainted by the 
insidious malaria of artificial habits and man- 
ners, neither enervated by the sirocco of fash- 
ion, nor blasted by the foul breath of squalor. 
We know that, reveling in the deep, sunlit, 
breezy beauty of nature, the child bloomed 
into a vigorous, laughing boy. 

And, thanks to the search of zealous biogra- 
phers, we know something of his father and of 
his mother. John Shakespeare, son of a sub- 
stantial farmer, and one of a family indigenous 
in Warwickshire, was at the time of William's 
birth a prosperous shop-keeper, dealing in 
gloves, in wool, in barley, in meat, offering 
to customers, as is still the usage in country 
towns, a miscellaneous variety. He was also a 
small land owner, held offices in the town gov- 
ernment, and in 15 71 was chosen chief alder- 
man of Stratford. Later he fell into poverty, 
and had to mortgage his wife's land at Ash- 
bies, near Stratford ; and later still, he had 



1 8 SHAKESPEARE. 

fallen so low pecuniarily as to be unable to 
pay his taxes. 

William Shakespeare, the poet, was the 
soundest of ideahsts ; we have a suspicion 
that his father, John Shakespeare, was an un- 
sound idealist. Such likenesses, with a differ- 
ence, are readily traceable in families. The 
sound idealist is one who, from the depth and 
accuracy of the perception and thought he 
brings to bear upon fact or fancy, sees them as 
they are more truly than common men ; and 
thence, the clearest human light being thrown 
upon his thinking and his doing, these are ex- 
ceptionally solid and successful. Your un- 
sound idealist mistakes his dreams for fact, 
and, being prone to dream while awake, will as- 
cribe to a real object a dreamy value ; and so, 
some day, will lead home a horse, for which he 
has given a large price, to discover, a week 
later, that this is not the horse he meant to 
buy, and that the one he paid for was an ideal 
horse. A man in business who is subject to 
these airy exaltations (which have the same 
source as the exaltations of poetry) will be 
speculative without judgment, deluded by a 
shallow visionariness, and, reversing the max- 
im of trade, to buy cheap and sell dear, will 



FIRST DECADES. 1 9 

often buy when prices are risen, to find him- 
self obliged to sell when they are fallen, and so 
come to grief. The same ideal tendency which, 
being buttressed by intellectual solidities and 
healthy emotions, impowered William to sweep 
safely along the track of the Sun-God, illumi- 
nating the world with a new day, when thus 
unsteadied, brought on John the fall of the 
adventurous Phaeton. 

John Shakespeare married above him. Mary 
Arden was the daughter of a yeoman, and the 
Ardens were a gentry family of some distinc- 
tion. Mary was the youngest of seven daugh- 
ters. It is said that one of the safest matri- 
monial enterprises is to take a wife from a 
numerous family of girls. Probably the lov- 
ing helpfulness, which is a cardinal womanly 
virtue, is here most finely cultivated through 
sisterly affection, the temper being kneaded by 
daily sympathetic contacts. This presupposes 
a good stock. To judge a tree by its fruit, 
where could the entire Caucasian race furnish 
a better stock than that from which sprang the 
mother of Shakespeare t Mary, though one of 
so large a flock, had, for her position in life, a 
pretty dower. John Shakespeare was, as we 
say familiarly, a lucky dog. Blessings on the 



20 SHAKESPEARE. 

impulses that brought him and Mary Arden 
together ! That was a match made indeed in 
heaven. 

Was Mary beautiful? We know not. To 
be good and intelligent and beautiful were a 
rarely rich mental dower. The mother of 
Shakespeare need not to have been beautiful ; 
she must have been good and intelligent, and 
being good and intelligent, her countenance 
would be attractive. If from a man's personal 
qualities, internal or external, we cannot with 
certainty infer thos'e of his parents, yet the 
ground-plan of his features, bodily and mental, 
will be traceable in his parents, and especially 
must a transcendent mind draw much from 
father and mother. When a human stream 
that for generations has been flowing undistin- 
guished; under ground as it were, of a sudden 
breaks through the earth, springing high into 
the air, a colossal perennial fountain, for the 
delight and invigoration of mankind, we can- 
not but believe that by its immediate prede- 
cessors it was concentrated for its mighty 
leap. 

Where did Shakespeare get his mind .? Pri- 
marily from the supernal spiritual source of all, 
of mind as of matter. Shg,kespeare's mind was 



FIRST DECADES. 21 

an intensely glowing spark from the celestial 
soul of the universe. The incarnation of every 
spark in human form takes place according to 
laws and conditions not inscrutable to human 
reason. Of first significance among these con- 
ditions are the moral and intellectual qualities 
of father and mother. John Shakespeare, we 
have seen, from prosperity sank into poverty, 
not being suddenly overtaken by some inevita- 
ble blow of adverse fortune, but growing grad- 
ually poor. Now, when a man, bred to active 
business, and prospering in it, begins, before 
he has passed the climax of middle life, to fall 
behind, to relax in his hold on the running 
threads, by the handling of which success is 
daily woven, we shall not go wrong if we as- 
cribe his misfortunes to mental deficiencies, 
especially to want of equilibrium among forces 
whose coaction produces practical ability, — 
deficiencies which are by no means incompati- 
ble with intellectual cleverness, or even able- 
ness, and still less with worth of character and 
attractiveness. From what is now positively 
known, through authentic, expressive, legal, 
and municipal records, of John Shakespeare's 
gradual decline from comfortable competency 
to depressing pecuniary straits, one is prompted 



22 SHAKESPEARE. 

to imagine that in that conjugal union, so un- 
utterably interesting to all English-speaking 
people forever, the gray mare was the "better 
horse. 

The first, the greatest, the most veritable 
fact is, that of this couple, John and Mary, the 
eldest son, William, was a- transcendent being, 
a man of mental might, a n^ew power in the 
world, a man of richest, deepest gifts. From 
the evident possession by parents of certain 
broad qualities, to say that their offspring will 
be so and so is not within our range. This is 
a prophetic going forward, where the mystery 
and affluence of nature baffle us. But to tell 
from matured, manly offspring what the par- 
ents were likely to be, this is a going back, 
and thus, being retrospective, is not so pre- 
sumptuous an effort. Both the factors of this 
sum are present to us, whereas in the other 
case one of the two is an unknown quantity to 
be discovered. 

After all, however, as we know nothing of 
Mary and little of John, it were perhaps bar- 
ren to attempt to allot to each the share each 
had in "the large composition" of William. 
John may have furnished the imaginative swing, 
and Mary the elements of that common sense 



FIRST DECADES. 23 

which gives to all Shakespeare's poetry its so- 
lidity, its nourishing sap, and which to all men- 
tal work, to the most imaginative as to the pro- 
saic, is as indispensable as to physics is gravi- 
tation, which to the motion of every form of 
matter gives its security and efficiency. While 
he probably got chiefly from his mother his 
clear judgment, his practical insight, he may 
at the same time have had from her his emo- 
tional expansibility, and much of his sensibil- 
ity to the beautiful. Poetic genius is emo- 
tional, intuitive, loving, and thus leans to 
the feminine side. Poetic genius implies, 
moreover, refinement of organization, and this 
must have been a prominent parcel in the 
dower from heaven to the mother of Shake- 
speare. 

With whatever fancies we may indulge our- 
selves in apportioning between this chosen 
pair the gifts which in the son flowered into 
such dazzling, unfading bloom, we stand on 
sure ground when we afiirm that in their com- 
position there could not have been malignity 
or meanness, neither pettiness nor insincerity. 
Both John and Mary were upright, earnest 
people. The seed of a sour apple will not 
yield sweet fruit. 



24 SHAKESPEARE. 

Mary Arden, — what a melody in the sylla- 
bles ! To all whose speech is English the 
name Mary has a fuller sanctification than for 
the rest of Christendom. Besides the Holy 
Mary, the mother of Jesus, we have Mary, the 
mother of Shakespeare. And to us Americans 
there is a still added love and reverence for 
the beautiful name, as we have Mary, the 
mother of Washington. 

Infants are more alike than children of three 
or four years, and small children than school- 
boys. As the mind grows the differences un- 
fold themselves, until in the matured man — 
and in different men maturity comes earlier or 
later — the individuality" stands distinctly re- 
vealed. What that individuality will be on its 
intellectual side is generally veiled until early 
manhood, especially in genial natures. The 
poet was scarcely discerned in the young man 
Wordsworth ; his family and friends were dis- 
pleased with him because in his twenty-fifth 
year he had not yet gone to work at some 
bread-earning business. When Shakespeare 
wrote Venus a7id Adonis (supposed to have 
been about in his twentieth year), the most far- 
sighted and accomplished of his contempora- 
ries could not thence have inferred, or remotely 



FIRST DECADES. . 25 

guessed, that here was the forerunner of Ham- 
let. If he read the poem to any of his ac- 
quaintance in Stratford, he probably got the 
reverse of encouragement to go on in the new 
path he had opened, — except from his mother, 
whose intuition and maternal instinct and par- 
tiality would have made her scent in many of 
these luxuriant stanzas something more last- 
ing than a youthful nosegay of fancy's flow- 
ers. 

As the record of Shakespeare's life from 
birth to marriage, in his nineteenth year, is a 
blank, whether or not his boyhood foretokened 
any high performance we know not. Grate- 
ful as it were to have of him what we have of 
Wordsworth, of Coleridge, of Goethe, a com- 
plete biographical report, we can console our- 
selves with the reflection that, although " the 
child is father of the man," the poet child is 
not much different from other children, and 
that only when a Hyperion, or an Adonais, or 
an Ode on Intimations of Immortality comes 
before them, do the class-mates and contempo- 
raries of the poet perceive and realize (and 
that only in part) the vast difference between 
themselves and him who had been their boy- 
ish companion. The soul, while laying the 



26 SHAKESPEARE. 

foundations of greatness, keeps its own coun- 
sel ; and what it had been doing and prepar- 
ing is only revealed by the completed work. 
The Tempest, and Lear, and Julius Ccesar tell 
us, and tell us with the peal of resounding 
clarions, that Shakespeare was a wonderful 
child, and from them, and only from them, can 
this be learnt ; so that we now^ know about the 
child William what his own father and mother 
had no inkling of. 

Looking back upon the boy William from 
heights so resplendently illuminated by lights 
enkindled by himself, we have the privilege of 
perceiving in him traits, movements, not ob- 
served, by his contemporaries; of discovering 
signs, of interpreting tones, unnoted by those, 
even, to whom he was dearest. By this far- 
gleaming light we behold the open-eyed boy 
slipping from his mother's lap to start, as all 
children do, on unending voyages of discovery, 
led and spurred by hope and curiosity, the de- 
lighted heir to a world of sparkling novelties ; 
handling, questioning, more intently than other 
children do, everything ; eagerly exploring the 
paths and by-ways of new beauty and knowl- 
edge ; quickly dropping what soon gets to be 
old to grasp the new, his big eyes ever alight 



FIRST DECADES. 2/ 

with wonder and intelligence. Are we not 
entitled to believe that of this eager boy Will- 
iam, who was to become Shakespeare, in the 
spontaneous, joyous feeding of the crescent 
faculties, the assimilations were more perfect, 
the transmutations of phenomena into knowl- 
edge more quickening, than in his playmates ? 
The life of healthy childhood is a perpetual 
dawn, watching for sunrise. We cannot but 
think that in his watching the hope was more 
deep and radiant, the curiosity more enliven- 
ing. And may we not be permitted to catch 
a glimpse of him in one of those blissful pre- 
monitory moments, overflowing with vitality, 
when in his seventh or eighth year he would 
pause in his play or his ramble, the visible 
world suddenly shut out, the light thrown 
upon it by his senses swallowed up in an in- 
ward flash from the soul that flooded his brain 
with the glow of premature* thought, startling 
him into ecstasy with its new power and mys- 
terious whisper } 

Stratford on Avon enjoyed a not common 
privilege : it had a free grammar-school. Of 
course, William Shakespeare was sent to it ; 
he was a bright boy, and his father was one of 
the principal citizens of Stratford. In 1571, 



28 SHAKESPEARE. 

when William was in his eighth year, John 
Shakespeare was elected first alderman ; this 
placed him at the head of the municipal gov- 
ernment. A quick boy, at a grammar-school 
of higher class, — say from his eleventh to 
his fourteenth year, — will learn and pick up 
much. A susceptible nature takes in as well 
by absorption as by direct appropriation. 
Happy, if little poison is absorbed. In a 
small country town of England, towards the 
end of the sixteenth century, the tone and 
influence of a school of this class would be 
healthy. Besides, from the brain of the boy 
who was to become Shakespeare would, 
through his native mental vigor and afflu- 
ence, flow forth magnetic currents to meet 
and neutralize defiling invasions from without. 
From the known fact that John Shake- 
speare's embarrassments obliged him to mort- 
gage the estate o'f Ashbies in 1578, it is in- 
ferred that William was withdrawn from school, 
probably, so early as his fourteenth year, to 
assist his father in business. This inference is 
supported by tradition ; and tradition, although 
never to be entirely trusted, has always some 
value. For one who was to be a world-poet 
this early apprenticeship to practical out-door 



FIRST DECADES. 29 

and in-door work was good discipline. How 
long it lasted no documents have yet been dis- 
covered to make known. Tradition says — 
and quite probably with truth — that for a 
while he was teacher in a school. His quick 
acquirement when himself a scholar would 
qualify him for this duty. Tradition likewise 
reports that he was, for a time, in a lawyer's 
office. 

With his prompt apprehensiveness, and with 
the unresting mental activity implied in the 
production, during only thirty years, of what 
he produced, Shakespeare would easily seize 
and retain many professional phrases and facts ; 
so that, to account f6r the numerous illustra- 
tions scattered through his pages, drawn from 
the professions, it is not necessary to suppose 
that he had been a lawyer and. a doctor and 
a sailor and a farmer. But the fact that in 
the two poems written in his youth, Venus 
and Adonis and Lucrece, illustrations taken 
from law forms and practices are frequent is 
circumstantial evidence, almost decisive, that 
he was for a year or two a student of law. 
These two poems were written before he went 
to London. That a young man should draw 
so many similes from the routine of a calling 



30 SHAKESPEARE, 

whose requirements are uncongenial to the 
thoughts and feelings which would possess 
him while producing these two poems is in- 
credible, except on the supposition that his 
young mind was just then in daily familiarity 
with this routine. Could he have strewn his 
pages with such figures of speech had not his 
brain been filled, through daily occupation, 
with the terms and processes of law ? Coun- 
try life and rural sports furnish the principal 
illustrations in the form of comparisons, sim- 
iles, metaphors, or of direct description, as the 
picture of the hunted hare in Venus and Ado- 
nis, distinct and true as poet's pen can make 
it, and that of the terrible boar, so vividly de- 
picted in the fears of Venus. Among these 
natural flexible presentations, — abundant as 
sunlit clouds in June, — the cold, rigid, legal 
terms are like patches of untimely snow on a 
May landscape. 

These conjectural inferences as to what 
Shakespeare was during his later boyhood and 
early youth, are they not as reasonable as they 
are welcome .-* They harmonize with the ma- 
tured mind and character of the man, as we 
learn these from his works ; the self-helpful- 
ness they involve befits a strong, manly nat- 



FIRST DECADES. 3 1 

ure. They give signs of rapid progress, un- 
der the momentum of aspiration and persist- 
ence of will. Can we conceive of the youth 
Shakespeare, with his capacities, being idle, — 
he who had early tasted, under his father's roof, 
the bitterness of poverty, and worse than pov- 
erty, impoverishment ? For a clever boy, bent 
upon supporting, and at the same time im- 
proving, himself, how natural it was that he 
should seek the post of assistant teacher ! To 
obtain the post would not be difficult for such 
a well-grown boy, with his intelligent, hand- 
some face and winning deportment. He 
whose habitual bearing in after years won for 
him among his companions the epithet gentle 
could not but have pleasing manners in his 
youth. The outward expression of the inward 
being of one from whom issued that crowd 
of vivid, beautiful creations between Venus 
mid Adonis and The Ternpest could not but 
be prepossessing. As in his thoughts and 
feelings there never was any harshness, or 
falseness, or malevolence, so in his demeanor 
there could be naught forbidding. The inward 
spring that was bubbling with the fancies 
whence were to leap Rosalind and Orlando, 
Ferdinand and Miranda, Perdita and Florizel, 



32 SHAKESPEARE. 

must have overflowed outwardly in gracious- 
ness and kindliness and delicacy. 

By no means, therefore, will we refuse to ac- 
cept the tradition that in his early youth Shake- 
speare was assistant teacher in a school. Such 
a place he would obtain through his scholarly 
competence, seconded by his engaging appear- 
ance. If he ever filled such a place, we may be 
sure that he did not get it by pushing. Was 
ever a genuine poet impudent or bold-faced .-* 
The refinement, which is a constituent of the 
poetic nature, so elevates his feelings, that his 
bearing cannot be other than appropriate and 
modest. Who can think of the young Shake- 
speare as obtrusive, malapert } As easy were 
it to think of the young Washington as deceit- 
ful and cringing. 

From teacher the step upward to lawyer is 
easily taken by an aspiring youth. I say up- 
ward, because the vocation of teacher, honora- 
ble and useful as any, offers no outlook beyond 
itself, as does that of lawyer. In both he would 
have leisure for reading and study, for carrying 
on that, the most important, part of every man's 
education, — self-education. This is effective 
in proportion to the gifts and grit of the self- 
educator, who in these efforts is much fur- 



FIRST DECADES. 



33 



thered by the knowledge and method acquired 
at school and college. 

Perfectly accordant, then, with the character 
and performance of Shakespeare, as we learn 
them from his contemporaries and his works, is 
the tradition that he was, in his later youth, first 
a teacher, then a law student. These early oc- 
cupations cultivated the Latin and other rudi- 
ments he had learnt at school, and left him 
spare time for self-instruction. England al- 
.ready possessed translations of Plutarch and 
Seneca, and of Italian tales. Through these 
were opened to him far-off worlds of literature 
and history and mythology. Genius is not self- 
subsistent. For his mind as well as for his 
body Shakespeare required food from without. 
To spin from his brain the silken threads of 
poetry, his brain needed that its exquisite juices 
be ripened and strengthened by nourishment 
sucked from the accumulated leaves of past 
knowledge and literature. 

There is no greater mistake than that genius, 
by virtue of its inward power, can dispense with 
outward aid, with levying upon the granaries of 
stored knowledge. If genius spreads its shin- 
ing sails without due ballast of fact, it is sure to 
founder. Knowledge, experience, other men's 

« 

3 



34 SHAKESPEARE. 

experience besides its own, are a necessary part 
of the outfit that genius needs to produce sub- 
stantial effects. The accumulations of the past 
are a richer inheritance to a man of genius 
than to other men ; he knows how to use them. 
Such accumulations are to him a high vantage- 
ground. Dante saw the further and clearer for 
standing on the mound of knowledge raised by 
his predecessors ; so did Michael Angelo ; so did 
Rubens. Goethe said, with deep significance, 
that he had always found rt profitable to know 
something. These were all industrious stu- 
dents, particularly in their younger days. So 
was Shakespeare, His faculties were strength- 
ened, enlarged, tempered, polished, by closely 
handling the treasures piled up by the ages. 
All this, and with it the alternations from 
comfort to poverty under his father's roof, was 
a good, — should we not say a necessary } — 
basis for the solid, uptowering superstructure 
of Shakespeare's after years. And moreover, 
for the structure that he was to uprear material 
was offered in Stratford with especial fullness, 
— material which, from his inborn bent and 
endowment, was a lively means of instruction 
and expansion. Here we step out from the 
fog of conjecture into clear sunlight; for we 



FIRST DECADES. 35 

know that Shakespeare was a brilhant, a mighty, 
poetic genius, and that likewise were innate in 
him an unsurpassed dramatic genius and dra- 
matic talent. With what appetite, then, with 
what intentness, must his young eyes and ears 
have looked and listened to the symbolic pag- 
eants, the swelling dialogues, of the stage ; and 
in what a prolific glow must have been laid 
upon his great, growing faculties flake upon 
flake of radiant visions and ardent conceptions, 
to be in after years shaped, distended, purified, 
magnified, into the most earnest and beautiful 
of artistic revelations ! 

From preserved records it is discovered that, , 
during Shakespeare's youth, scarcely a year 
passed without some theatrical entertainment 
being offered to the inhabitants of Stratford. 
And it is a curious fact that 1569, the year in 
which a company was for the first time allowed 
to exhibit in the town hall, was the year in 
which John Shakespeare was bailiff, or chief 
magistrate. Halliwell, in his valuable Life of 
Shakespeare, infers from the municipal records 
that John Shakespeare was probably an espe- 
cial patron of the stage. William, in 1569, was 
in his sixth year. 

Theatrical shows and performances are to 



36 SHAKESPEARE. 

boys as exciting as the Arabian Nights. 
In their presentations there is a mystery, a 
grandeur, a pretension, that fill the young im- 
agination with seductive visions. What must 
they then have been to the boy who was born 
to elevate their grandeurs, to deepen their 
mysteries, to surpass their most astounding 
wonders ? We may be sure ~ that he never 
missed one of the many Stratford exhibitions. 
As he grew older he would be irresistibly 
drawn into personal acquaintance with the 
players, several of whom were from the town 
of Stratford. What more natural than that, 
when he felt in his brain some of the ambition 
of manhood, he should try his young hand 
on dramatic scenes ! This, however, may not 
have been until he had got assurance of his 
poet gift by producing Veims and Adonis and 
Lucrece, conjectured, with great probability, 
to have been written about in his twenty-first 
year. 

And what more natural than that, witness- 
ing the prosperity of Burbage and others of 
his townsmen, urged by the innate dramatic 
and histrionic gifts throbbing dimly within 
him, depressed by the impoverishment of his 
father, pressed by the dreary outlook round 



FIRST DECADES. 37 

^he hearth of his young family, this vigorous 
young genius should, at the age of twenty-two 
or three, have joined a theatrical company ! 
Prepossessing he must have been, and hand- 
some we have proof that he was, from his por- 
traits, — both strong recommendations in the 
actor's profession. Knowing what powers lay 
dormant in him, how affable he was, we cannot 
doubt there was a magnetism in this youthful 
man that would draw to him the affections of 
his theatrical companions. They would read- 
ily admit him to their company ; and once ad- 
mitted, he would soon win them by his modest 
superiority in looks and manners, as in practi- 
cal ability. Here I do not use the language 
of conjecture. He who carried in him such 
abounding sources of feeling and intellect, 
illumined by rarest poetic sensibility, must 
have been all this, and more. A creature pre- 
eminently endowed with sensibility and intel- 
lect, in the glowing circle of whose manifold 
gifts there was no chasm, no breach, could not 
but be captivating, attaching. The orbicular 
completeness of his superb faculties would in- 
sure gracefulness, together with sympathy of 
bearing. 

The records of Stratford show that in the 



38 SHAKESPEARE. 

year 1587 several theatrical companies per- 
formed in the town, among them one desig- 
nated as the Queen's Players. To this com- 
pany, afterwards styled the Lord Chamberlain's, 
Shakespeare belonged in 1589, as is proved by 
a petition in that year to the Privy Council. 
In this document are inserted the names of 
sixteen players, "all of them sharers in the 
blake Fryers playhouse ; " and among the six- 
teen is the name of William Shakespeare. As 
1586 is the earliest date assigned for his migra- 
tion to London, this important document ex- 
hibits young Shakespeare as rising rapidly. 
He had become in two or three years a co- 
partner in the principal theatre of London, at 
the age of twenty-six. At first his vocation 
was that of actor. And he was a good actor,' 
but acting was in his case, as with several oi 
his contemporaries, but initiatory discipline for 
the higher vocation of dramatist. Immedi- 
ately on joining the company, he no doubt 
gave proof of skill as a playwright. Among 
his partners were several who wrote or adapted 
plays. It was a dramatic age. 

Let us now go back to Stratford and 1582. 
Some years before he went to London, and 
towards the end of November, 1582, Shake- 



FIRST DECADES. 39 

speare, in his niDeteenth year, married Anne 
Hathaway, a maiden of twenty-six, daughter of 
a yeoman in the -neighborhood of Stratford. 
Save that she has the unparalleled distinction 
of being the wife of Shakespeare, we know 
nothing of Anne Hathaway, but what is told 
by a few dry public records. The disparity in 
years, on the wrong side, provokes curiosity. 
Shakespeare, with his warm temperament, was 
just the youth to be fascinated by the charms 
of a mature woman. What those charms were 
we have no means of even guessing. They 
may have been psychical rather than physical ; 
they may have been both. One would fain 
believe that Shakespeare's first love was a 
richly endowed woman, a model of beauty and 
duty. But from what is known of the loves 
of poets, we are not justified in so conclud- 
ing. Love seems intended by nature to be a 
blinder : a device, probably, of the god Hymen 
to promote marriage. For the performance 
of its incalculable function this predominating 
impulse takes from those under its sway the 
power of seeing things as they are. The mar- 
riage of William and Anne appears to have 
been attended with some haste and secrecy. 
As in that region betrothment was customary, 



40 SHAKESPEARE. 

mis ceremony being regarded as holy and bind- 
ing, like marriage, one need have no uncom- 
fortable thoughts because Susannah, their first 
child, came into the world within six or seven 
months after the marriage. 

To them, early in 1585, twins were born, 
christened Judith and Hamnet. These with 
Susannah were the only children they ever had. 
From this fact, and Shakespeare's migration 
to London, probably within a year after the 
birth of the twins, inferences have been drawn 
as to the conjugal relations of the pair. Had 
Shakespeare been the happiest of young hus- 
bands and fathers, he would nevertheless, we 
doubt not, have joined the. players ; impelled 
by poverty and the bleakness of the pecuniary 
outlook at Stratford, tempted by the promises 
of his townsmen among the players, and moved 
by the promptings of his distinctive genius. 
Here was a strong array of outward and inward 
motions, prompting him to seek his fortune 
through a theatrical company in the metropolis 
of England. For himself he found in it fame 
and fortune ; for humanity, priceless treasures. 

From their susceptibility and fineness of feel- 
ing, poets are not less but more liable than 
their prosaic neighbors to disappointments and 



FIRST DECADES. 4 1 

crosses and losses in the fervent encounters of 
the affections. Of the personal matrimonial re- 
lations between these two we know nothing. 
Before their hearth fate has hung an impen- 
etrable veil. We shall not sacrilegiously send 
our imagination behind this veil. Whatever 
thoughts shall present themselves shall come 
guarded by absolute impartiality and folded 
in tenderest sympathy for both. We say for 
both ; for since Anne shares the august name 
of Shakespeare, she shares the unspeakable 
reverence which that name inspires. Never- 
theless, seeing what a superb, immeasurable 
individual her husband was, we may be par- 
doned for doubting that in this particular dual 
oneness Anne was the better half. 

The tradition that Shakespeare took deer 
from the park of Sir Thomas Lucy we are in- 
clined to look upon as one of those derogatory, 
impeditive legends such as are sometimes fast- 
ened upon the opening career of a great man, 
originating in envy and jealousy, and fostered 
by malevolence. It is hard for men to • be 
mutely passive when they behold the reputation 
of a neighbor going up. To keep it from rising 
there is apt to be a pretty universal simulta- 
neous pull. In this down-dragging effort the 



42 SHAKESPEARE. 

most active will be the ambitious, and among 
these the most rigidly swollen muscles will be 
those of the disappointed ambitious. By the 
brilliancy and rapidity of his ascending flight 
Shakespeare/' the upstart crow," was just the 
figure to stir up the bitterest dregs in ambitious 
aspirants for dramatic fame. He soon came 
up with and then passed the best of them in 
contemporary reputation. And to-day, Marlow, 
Ford, Chapman, Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, 
Kyd, Decker, Massinger, Webster, how much 
greater would be their renown had there been 
no Shakespeare ? And with every generation 
the distance between them and him will be 
wider, until, in a century hence, while his name 
will glow with a still added brightness, they 
will have faded into shadows. 

But, besides this comparatively limited class 
of competitors and rivals, many natures are so 
egotistic, and so negatively positive, that they 
can hardly bear to admit that another man is 
even as good as themselves,- and, through in- 
herent inexpansiveness, are incapable of reach- 
ing the superlative degree in their estimate of 
others. To some men praise of another feels 
very like dispraise of themselves. To the ears 
of a large and unhappy class, the names of 



FIRST DECADES. 43 

Dante, Luther, Milton, Newton, Shakespeare, 
Washington are sounds unmusical. And then, 
most people, — might we not say all ? — are 
willing to listen to disparagement of tjie great. 
The discovery of spots on them brings about, 
in some mysterious way, the whitening of our 
own skins. To exhibit their short-comings is 
a substantiation of community of breed. To 
con the faults of uncommon people is a consol- 
atory self-flattery to common human nature. 

The animus of this story is betrayed in its 
wording ; it is miscalled deer-stealing. Poach- 
ing — whatever the dictionaries may say — 
is not stealing. Punishable by law, it is not a 
moral offense ; it does not break the seventh 
commandment. To catch and carry off a deer 
is not the same as to catch and carry off a 
sheep. One is wild, the other domestic ; this 
makes the moral difference. To seize a deer, 
as the boldest kind of poaching, was a saucy, 
adventurous, defiant proceeding, and one which 
an honorable, well-conditioned youth might, 
for a frolic^ commit once or twice. The public 
knowledge of the adventure would leave no 
stain on his character. As to stealing, we 
should as soon associate the thought of theft 
with the conduct of St. Paul as with that of 
Shakespeare. 



44 SHAKESPEARE. 

Still less probable is the sequel to this tale, 
that Shakespeare had to quit Stratford in con- 
sequence of the legal prosecution of him by 
Sir Thomas Lucy for trespass on his park. 
(Some investigators think they have discov- 
ered that Sir Thomas Lucy had no park and 
no deer.) These extrinsic incidents, the tres- 
pass and the prosecution, may have been, but 
besides their merely traditional character, dis- 
credit is thrown upon them by this, that allsuf- 
ficient to account for Shakespeare's quitting 
Stratford for London are the intrinsic causes, 
— his want of money, his acquaintance with 
actors who frequently performed at Stratford, 
their attraction towards a handsome young 
man of captivating address and conversation, 
and, deep within himself, an unconscious im- 
petus towards the fulfillment of his high des- 
tiny. 

By these urgent interior motives for his 
joining the players, especially by friendships 
formed, probably, with them at Stratford, is in- 
validated that other tradition which would 
make of Shakespeare a holder of horses for 
the frequenters of the theatre. In such an in- 
itiatory occupation there is nothing in the 
slightest degree disreputable ; for any honest 



FIRST DECADES. ' 45 

work is honorable. Moreover, the lower the 
step from which Shakespeare started, the 
higher will be the admiration and wonder at 
the sweep and elevation of his flight The 
story may have its origin in the exaggeration 
of some single incident, and then would owe 
its perpetuation and amplification to the spirit 
of detraction. 

A young man with Shakespeare's necessi- 
ties, temperament, talents, impulsions, capabil- 
ities, only needs a friendly opportunity to set to 
work with a will. Never had a beginner a more 
tempting, a more arable field. To be perfected, 
nay, to be created, was the drama of England. 
And here was the age in which, if created at 
all, it must be done ; and here was the mate- 
rial, rich, abundant, wherewith it could, be 
done ; and here was the man, the only man, 
who could do it. 

To lay the foundations whereon are to be 
reared Macbeth, and Lear, and Twelfth Night, 
and Cymbeline, and The Tempest, nature works 
in her most vital genial mood, and with her 
most electric instruments. To strengthen 
these foundations had concurred favoring cir- 
cumstances. The boy had a healthy, happy 
childhood; in schooling he had enjoyed the 



46 SHAKESPEARE. 

share of the chosen few : his not having been 
to Oxford or Cambridge was probably, in that 
age, to him not much loss. He had drunk of 
the sweet and the bitter of life, had been 
steeped in passion, was a husband and father, 
had written notable poems, had looked into 
ancient literature enough to learn what a range 
human thought and history can take ; and now, 
at about the age of twenty-three, he found 
himself in London, toiling, strenuous, seething 
London. 

Through the deep, mental stir caused by the 
Reformation, through the opening of America 
to enterprise and commerce, through the war- 
like spirit engendered by national commotions 
and rivalries, through the genius and vigor of 
English statesmen and naval leaders, and 
through the bold initiatives of her merchants 
and adventurers, London was become a chief 
pivot of European movement, a nervous cen- 
tre throbbing with national and individual life, 
expanding with the expansion of the civilized 
world, which just at this era was taking one of 
its bounding leaps. As this young actor from 
Stratford there was not in Elizabeth's earnest 
capital another man so capable of growing 
with the new sapful growth of England, not 



FIRST DECADES. 4/ 

another whose pulses could absorb so much 
of the vitality of that impassioned age. 

To become familiar with the business of the 
stage will be serviceable to him who is to do 
the business of the dramatist. The practice of 
the play-actor facilitated for Shakespeare the 
function of the play-writer. Poetry, and espe- 
cially poetry intended to come upon the boards, 
should have a firm, material basis. It hap- 
pened that in Shakespeare's, case his fellow- 
actors were better instructors than would have 
been tutors at the university. To one whose 
first dramatic work was the adaptation to the 
stage of plays written by other hands, especially 
helpful was the practice of the performer. 

In the heat of the lively histrionic competi- 
tion in' London at that time, quick-witted men 
like the Burbages would not be slow to dis- 
cover what a jewel they had picked up at 
Stratford. Bear in mind that in 1586 — the 
earliest date assignable, according to the testi- 
mony we have, for his arrival in London — 
Shakespeare was twenty-three years of age, 
that he had already written Venus mid Adonis y 
a poem of more than thirteen hundred ten- 
syllable lines, and Lucrece, a poem of about fif- 
teen hundred similar lines. That he, more- 



48 SHAKESPEARE. 

over, had tried his hand at drama before he 
quitted Stratford is probable. When he fin- 
ished Venus and Adonis and Liter ece (plausi- 
bly inferred to be about his twenty-first or 
twenty-second year) he took his degree as 
poet, and with highest honors. Read them, to 
learn what floods of poetic power and beauty, 
of originality and of intellectual strength, had 
early poured themselves through the pen of 
the glowing young giant. 

By the knowledge and discipline gained 
through the writing of these two original lux- 
uriant poems he was empowered, after a brief 
apprenticeship as actor, to take in hand plays 
already existing, and; by excisions, additions, 
substitutions, modifications, adapt them to the 
stage. This first period of his dramatic career, 
when he was chiefly engaged in getting up 
pieces for his company, might be called his 
playwright period. Shakespeare was a man 
of astonishing genius ; and genius not only 
illumines the path of the intellect, as with a 
precursive pillar of fire, but feeds and strength- 
ens the intellectual activities ; so that, finding 
himself in a position most propitious to giving 
free swing to the drift of his genius, he laid 
rapidly bare his clear, strong talents in the 



FIRST DECADES. 49 

practical, and doubtless profitable, craft of re- 
modeler, improver, and adapter of existing 
plays, that lacked organization, proportion, 
characterization, and poetry. One can fancy 
the rejoicing astonishment of the Burbages, 
and other of the older hands, at noting the 
rapid success of their young associate in trans- 
forming dull into vivid scenes, perfusing them 
with a phosphorescent light, like the rosy elec- 
tric play of the mysterious aurora borealis, 
which warms and irradiates what just before 
was cold and dark. On many a passionate 
conjunction, out of the heaven of his poetic 
imagination would flash a beam, as sometimes 
through a rift in stormy night-clouds will shoot 
down stars to quiver on the billows of an agi- 
tated ocean. 

What were the pieces on which Shakespeare 
first laid his magical hand cannot be positively 
affirmed ; but the most clear-sighted and sym- 
pathetic of his commentators, led by Coleridge, 
and represented more recently by Gervinus, 
agree generally in looking upon Titus An- 
dronicus, Henry VI., Pericles, Comedy of Er- 
rors, Taming of the Shrew, as the plays which 
through his pen underwent rifacimento, or 
working over. We can readily believe him 
4 



50 SHAKESPEARE. 

to have first taken hold of Henry VI., and 
thus to have opened the vista of those mag- 
nificent poetic Histories, the creating of which 
constitutes Shakespeare the great National 
Poet of England. Two plays of Henry VI. by 
Robert Greene were the foundation on which 
he built his Henry VI. In this reconstruction, 
many times the creative maker breaks through 
the playwright's craft. 

To the potential poetic dramatist a most 
vivacious apprenticeship is this furbishing, re- 
dressing, of other men's dramatic work, which 
only a poet's hand can do effectively. The 
want of poetry in these plays was the dis- 
abling want in them ; thence, like hundreds of 
others, they had fallen into discredit, and lay 
unpresentable and lifeless. Into them young 
Shakespeare breathed some of the breath of 
poetic life, — that breath whereby alone can 
high literature be kept alive. He re-animated 
them; and only a Shakespeare could do that 
vital act. 

But while remodeling and vitalizing the 
plays of others, the aspiring poet would be 
naturally — with his exuberant power we 
might say irresistibly — impelled to try an 
unassisted flight into the realm of drama. 



FIRST DECADES. 5 I 

Two Gentlemen of Verona and Love s Labor 
Lost bear clear internal evidence of having 
been written in the earlier years of his bril- 
liant dramatic career ; and they are wholly 
his. Nor has there been found for- Titus 
Andronicus any earlier play than the one 
ascribed to Shakespeare. Only by tradition is 
it claimed that he wrought after a model. To 
Coleridge internal evidence proves Titus An- 
dronicus to be not Shakespeare's except in 
passages ; and it were hard to find a shrewder 
judge of that kind of evidence than Coleridge. 
The quick succession of bloody horrors, that 
are the chief incidents of the piece, are by 
some made ah argument against its being by 
Shakespeare. But may not the young Titan 
have felt, and chosen to indulge, an impulse to 
outbloat Marlow and Kyd } To me the flow 
and texture of the verse do not seem quite 
those of the young poet who was already the 
author of Venus and Adonis, and Lucrece, In 
the characters, incidents, and verse there is 
an unshakespearean shallowness. A cardinal 
feature of Shakespeare's individuality, and a 
token of its greatness, is, under inward pres- 
sure of imaginative thought, to dip below the 
surface. In the lines of Titus Andronicus 



52 SHAKESPEARE. 

one misses, too, that flashing into figures of 
speech which gives to Shakespeare's pages 
such a bloom. We cannot believe that he 
could have originally written five acts of shal- 
low horrors, where the killing of fnen seems to 
be committed with as little quickening of the 
pulse as the slaying of oxen in a slaughter- 
house ; where, save Lavinia, there is not a per- 
sonage sympathy towards whom would not be 
a wasteful perversity. That Shakespeare even 
took in hand such monsters, to put a little 
poetic fire here and there into their ferocity, 
could only be from a half-frolicksome impulse 
of vaunt, to show that the young Hercules, 
even with his unknit sinews, wielded a club 
with which he could knock on the head the 
most savage of his bloody-penned contempo- 
raries, and bespatter with their brains the 
pavement of degenerate Rome. Or did he 
not undertake to deepen the horrors of Titus 
Andronicus, in order to make the whole piece 
a surer irony of the raw-head and bloody-bones 
style of drama fashionable when he first came 
to London .? Perhaps this is the best way of 
accounting for the connection of even Shake- 
speare's youthful name with suchpseudo-tragic, 
unpoetic scenes. 



FIRST DECADES. 53 

Except what he did for Henry VI. (which 
had for him the healthy fragrance of nation- 
ality), Titus Andronictis stands isolated among 
the dramas of his first period. Tragedy need 
not be uncongenial to youthful dramatic gen- 
ius ; but historic drama demands a maturity 
of understanding and experience of life which 
only three or four decades can give. 

By a petition of the sharers in the Black- 
friars Theatre to the Privy Council in 1589, 
made acquainted with the important fact that 
in that year Shakespeare was one of the share- 
holders, we are prompted to ask, Might not 
• his name have appeared in the petition had it 
been dated November, 1588, instead of No- 
vember, 1 5 89.-* For believing in this possi- 
bility we have warrant by what we positively 
know of his talents, his genius, and his indus- 
try. Through these he could not but make 
rapid progress when once on the broad, lively 
arena so suited to the fullest exhibition of his 
immense and varied powers. In a couple of 
years he might easily have earned the place of 
a sharer. The year 1588 was the year of the 
Spanish Armada, that ostentatious but most 
formidable enterprise aimed at the very national 
being of England; and it is a pleasant thought, 



54 SHAKESPEARE. 

that, while English seamanship, courage, man- 
hood, heroism, were dealing, in the Channel 
near by, deadly blows to this arrogant, por- 
tentous monster, in London the air was just 
beginning to vibrate to the chords of that new 
music of thoughtful speech that was gradually 
to swell into richest, deepest, most sonorous 
harmonies, worthy to be the chief glory of the 
English mind. It is not at all capriciously fan- 
ciful to suppose that, on the very days when 
Frobisher and Drake and Hawkins with gun, 
sword, and pike, were striking deep wounds 
into that proud, menacing colossus, the Span- 
ish Ernpire, and thus, while saving the politi- 
cal power of England from overthrow, were 
strengthening for all Christendom the founda- 
tions of civil and religious freedom, Shake- 
speare, then in his twenty-fifth year, was with 
hopeful joy writing down the first scenes of 
his first original drama, — say of Two Gentle- 
men of Verona, or Loves Labor Lost, — and 
thus announcing the poetical primacy of Eng- 
land among modern nations. 

In both of these comedies we have the fra- 
grant promise of the bountiful fruits of their 
author's after-growth. Of course, marks of im- 
maturity are palpable ; the characters are not 
yet definitely outlined or cunningly drawn, the 



FIRST DECADES. 55 

construction lacks compactness, the medita- 
tion is not profound. But there is here, as in 
the "first heir of his invention," Vemcs and 
Ado?iis, that wide and active thoughtfulness 
which is the characteristic of first-class minds, 
and, as concomitant of this, continuity, at once 
sprightly and logical, of the mental current, 
where, through the generative impulse given 
by poetic imagination, thought breeds thought 
in a fervid flow. In this distinctive attribute 
of large genius, the endless revivication of the 
mind by its own activity, Shakespeare is une- 
qualed. We have here, too, his humorous, 
combined with his moral, view of life. In both 
plays there are sound and wise sayings, but 
not yet the wisest, and over and about both, 
emanating from the genial soul of the young 
poet," glistens an indescribable poetic atmos- 
phere. Reading them we feel ourselves, as • 
when we walk out in early spring, breathed 
upon by the virgin breath of unfurling leaves 
and peeping buds impatient for deeper drafts 
of solar warmth to shower about them their 
beauty of color and perfume, with here and 
there a privileged half-blown rose, that, through 
inward warmth, has burst prematurely forth 
on a bush of buds, proclaiming the near future 
splendors. 



II. 

RIPENESS. 

• In Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare leapt 
from spring into summer. Among his works 
this glowing drama has the place of a fervent 
noon in May, tremulous with the heat of July, 
while still laden with vernal fragrance. In hu- 
man growth indefinable is the line between 
ripeness and unripeness. A nature so deep, 
abundant, aspiring, as that of Shakespeare, is 
ever ripening. But as man, and still more 
pointedly as artist, Shakespeare had his period 
of crudeness. By good critical investigators 
he is believed to have been several years at 
work on Romeo and Juliet, from 1592 to 1594 
or 1595, that is, from his twenty-eighth to 
his thirty-first year. As a bridge between his 
young manhood and his middle manhood it 
would be built carefully and slowly. Yet, in 
its final state, as we have it now in print, and 
as representative of the opening of the riper 
period, it stands in such contrast to others of 



RIPENESS. 



S7 



his plays, presumed to have preceded it in 
date, that we call it a leap from comparatively 
shallow streams into dramatic and poetic 
deeps. 

" When I was in love I wrote love-poems," 
says Goethe ; and so he wrote a great many, 
through a long series of years. To some of 
the good people who condemn Goethe for be- 
ing so often in love, this were a pertinent ques- 
tion : " Dont you wish that you coztld be ? " 
The man who wrote Romeo and yuliet had 
a large capability of love. It is the most im- 
passioned drama Shakespeare ever wrote, and 
the passion which gives it such fiery life being 
the most powerful in human nature, it draws 
old and young, warm and even cold, into the 
whirlpool of its charm ; — aye, but it does so 
through the might of poetry, for none but a 
great poet, the greatest of poets, could. present 
becomingly, attractively, faithfully, the master- 
passion in its beautiful but terrific excess. 
Here, for the first time in drama (if we are not 
mistaken in dates), Shakespeare stood forth 
fully arrayed in the poetic splendors of his 
great calling. Juliet is first made visible to 
us by one of its liveliest flashes : when Romeo 
first beholds her, to him 



58 SHAKESPEARE. 

" She seems to hang upon the cheek of night 
Like a rich jewel in an Ethiop's ear." 

It is in keeping that poetry should be made to 
sparkle its brightest at the introduction of her 
round whom it has thrown so vivid a lustre 
that in the imagination of men she will shine 
a magnetic light forever. - With tenderest fa- 
miliarity Shakespeare so nestks himself in the 
heart of the glowing girl that he can give 
voice to her most sacred feelings. It is as if, 
a delicate spirit, he had the privilege of riding 
on the quickened arteries of her richest blood, 

— those currents that carry from her heart to 
her cheek her sweetest desires and blushes. 
The multiplicity and sureness of his intuitions 
give to Shakespeare his unique supremacy. 

Here, too, we have compact characterization, 

— in the intellectual, refined, high-minded Mer- 
cutio, in the truculent Tybalt, in the benevcv- 
lent, indulgent, wise friar Laurence, in the 
carnal-minded, garrulous, spoilt old nurse, be- 
sides Romeo himself, of whom, being very 
young, we can only confidently say that there 
is in him the making of a noble, efficient man, 
as we cannot but exclaim of Juliet, with such 
a will and such capacity what a splendid 
woman she would have become. 



RIPENESS, 59 

Romeo and Juliet is the tragedy of love 
only because it is the drama of hate. But for 
the senseless, wicked animosity between ,the 
Capulets and Montagues, the love of these two 
innocents would not have been steeped in 
blood and death. Had Romeo been a bidden, 
a welcome guest at Capulet's ball, the mutual 
love at first sight would have enwrapt him and 
Juliet all the same in its peremptory folds. 
Instead of there being a secret, sudden mar- 
riage — the secrecy and the isolation of the 
lovers intensifying unhealthily their passion 
— they would have had a numerous, happy 
wedding, to the joy of both families. The feud 
between the two houses was the remote as 
well as immediate cause of the sudden, tragic 
end of the promising, impassioned pair. 

While in Romeo a7id Juliet love is swal- 
lowed up in tragedy, in Midsummer Night' s 
Dream love is bantered and flouted by com- 
edy. The whole piece, after we have read it, 
and while reading it, makes the impression of 
a remembered, disjointed dream, in which re- 
ality is mocked. The play is a humorous 
mask gotten up by the master of the revels 
for the marriage festival of Theseus and Hyp- 
polita. To give himself the fullest freedom, 



60 . SHAKESPEARE. 

Shakespeare throws the scene back beyond 
history into the legendary era of Athens. 
Through its crowd of individual beauties, 
through its treative potency in the delicate, 
delectable fairies, through the rounded, har- 
monious coalescence of diverse and contrasted 
personages, this play is a' poetic masterpiece. 
It sparkles with fun, irony, and poetry. Shake- 
speare, the most poetically imaginative of men, 
is at the same time the most realistic. In his 
highest flights into dreamland or cloudland or 
fairyland, he ever binds himself to- the earth 
with threads woven out of her bowels, how- 
ever fine may be their filaments ; and the in- 
fallibility of his intuitions gives to incidents a 
wise significance, to individualities a generic 
breadth, of which himself was hardly conscious 
at the moment. What a playful, meaningful 
irony may we not read in Titania's love for 
Bottom with the ass's head, and her disgust 
when she is disenchanted } In Midsummer 
Night's Dream Shakespeare multiplies beauty 
and piles wonder on wonder with a lavishness 
of resource and joyous facility unsurpassed by 
anything one can think of but nature in her 
tropical luxuriance, or the teeming air which, 
on a calm, summer afternoon, adds glory to 



RIPENESS. 6l 

glory in buoyant tiers of white, illuminated 
clouds, preparing to do honor to their begetter, 
the sun, who requites the homage by pres- 
ently transforming the fleecy mountains of 
white into rosy gorgeousness. 

It does not appear that Shakespeare was in- 
tellectually precocious. To be sure we have 
no line of his before 1584 or 1585, when, in 
his twentieth or twenty-first year, he probably 
wrote Vemis and Adonis, But from the evi- 
dence of his progressiveness in dramatic writ- 
ing, and from the quahties of his earhest in 
comparison with his later plays, we perceive 
that his power unfolded itself with a certain 
slowness, which, indeed, unless he were a mir- 
acle, could not be otherwise, however quick 
was his genius. This betokens depth of in- 
wardness, which is not apt to be accompanied 
by prematurity. 

Certain men rise quickly to a limited eleva- 
tion, chiefly through memory ; but not having 
in them the emotional susceptibility thoroughly 
to assimilate the sap of what observation and 
memory collect, they are, — unless they work 
in the domain of the exact sciences, whence 
emotion is excluded, — and cannot but be, 
superficial, and are thus doomed to be soon 



62 SHAKESPEARE. 

forgotten. ' Of this type are Brougham and 
Macaulay, who stand in contrast to writers 
hke Coleridge and Carlyle, who, to an equal 
degree of memory and a higher intellect, add- 
ing depth through emotional power, thus im- 
part to their literary work the light which 
gives length of life. 

Shakespeare's memory (arid it was of rare 
compass and tenacity) he used as the servant 
of reason and poetry. And what service it 
did him already in Venus and Adonis ! This 
remarkable poem — remarkable for itself as 
well as for bei*ng Shakespeare's first — was 
not published until 1593. The author, now in 
his thirtieth year, dedicated it, as the "first 
heir of my invention," to his young friend the 
Earl of Southampton. Is it through a delu- 
sion of the fancy that I think I discover in 
this poem prefigurement of all the great qual- 
ities of Shakespeare's mind } First to be 
marked, as fortifying the whole, is what might 
be called a constitutional quality of Shake- 
speare's poetry, namely, body. Poetry has its 
scale of specific gravities. An equal bulk of 
some poetry has the weightiness of gold in 
comparison with some other which ranks spe- 
cifically with silver, or perhaps with composite 



RIPENESS. 63 

brass. This comes of the substantiality, with 
fine texture, of fresh thought ; and when such 
thought is perfused with feeling and animated 
by poetry, verse has the spirit and perfume as 
well as the body of a rich Burgundian wine, 
which, deriving its strength and essential flavor 
from the soil, is fed by the prolific, invisible 
air, and ripened by genial sunshine. 

Of Venus and Adonis although only a de- 
scriptive poem, another characteristic — and 
one which would have rejoiced a competent 
sympathetic critic with the splendor of its 
promise — is the obvious wealth of the quarry 
from which is drawn the material for its poetic 
structure. Here already is evidence of what 
a deep, inexhaustible mine it was, the interior 
endowment of Shakespeare. The Italian fash- 
ion of the day, which took pleasure in poetic 
artificiality, in strained conceits, in ostentation 
of mythology, furnished most of the defects 
as well as the subject of Venus and Adonis. 
The originality, the lively, intellectual current, 
the facility, flow from Shakespeare's own 
marvelous brain, which, at this first contact 
with a poetic enterprise, seems to bound and 
boil, like the horse of Adonis, with quick de- 
sire : 



64 SHAKESPEARE. 

" His nostrils drink the air, and forth again, 
As from a furnace, vapors doth he send. 
His eye, which scornfully glistens like fire. 
Shows his hot courage, and his high desire. 
Sometimes he trots, as if he told the steps. 
With gentle majesty, and modest pride ; 
Anon he rears upright, curvets and leaps, 
As who should say, lo ! thus my strength is tried." 

What a picture of a horse ^ Instead of va- 
pors, the poet's brain, with lavish superabun- 
dance, outbreathes figures of speech. In his 
great dramas these, being controlled by art, 
are more deeply planted in the texture of the 
thought, which it thus braces and illustrates. 
Of the wild exuberance of figurative treasures, 
displayed all through the poem, take this as 
an example : 

" This ill presage advisedly she marketh : 
Even as the wind is hushed before it raineth ; 
Or as the wolf doth grin before he barketh, 
Or as the berry breaks before it staineth ; 
Or like the deadly bullet of a gun. 
His meaning struck her ere his words begun." 

In this early narrative effort another qual- 
ity of the great dramatic poet is manifest — 
compression with copiousness. Having so full 
a mind, Shakespeare often dilates, while at 
the same time he concentrates meaning into 
single lines and sentences. Again, in Venus 



RIFE NESS. 65 

and Adonis is charmingly conspicuous what 
is a token of the poetic organization, and is 
one of the happiest of possessions, vivifying 
especially Shakespeare's comedies, — without 
which, indeed, no successful poetic drama 
could be achieved, — I mean, delight in life. 
This delight comes of sympathy with living 
beings, and this sympathy breeds knowledge, 
and that of the most profitable kind — knowl- 
edge of the soul of things. 

A young poet would take a subject like 
Venus mid Adonis because he had warm 
thoughts and glowing pictures to give forth. 
Wordsworth never would have chosen such 
a subject, because he lacked this warmth of 
temperament. To this warmth we owe the 
charm of Shakespeare's numerous, peerless 
company of lovely women, from Rosalind to 
Miranda. In the poet Shakespeare this tem- 
perament was an immeasurable virtue, giving 
depth, truth, refinement, attractiveness to the 
" better half " of his characterizations. To the 
man, it seems to have been at one time a cause 
of suffering, self-reproach, contrition. Let us 
not be ready with pharisaic blame, but grate- 
fully give our sympathy to a benefactor, that 
to him personally was a source of distress that 
5 



66 SHAKESPEARE. 

which to the highest department of our ht- 
erature was a source of power and beauty. 
Through the union of a fine susceptibiHty to 
the beautiful with the amorous temperament 
is generated round the perceptions an atmos- 
phere through which much that is most pre- 
cious and lovable in life gains significance and 
light ; while, at the same time, under certain 
conditions, this union adds a fiery force to 
temptation. 

In a social state growing out of unsound 
principles of association, the passions, — the 
great factors of human life, — not having an 
open, broad, fair field for their play, and being 
irrepressible, will seek narrow,- secret by-ways 
and forbidden precincts for their gratification. 
There are at present signs of a tendency to a 
higher order, but as yet our civilized society is 
as disordered as it was in the sixteenth cen- 
tury, and hence, especially through the action 
of the sexual feeling, vice, misery, crime. But 
Shakespeare, however personally a partial vic- 
tim to perverted passion, had too clear a moral 
vision to be deceived as to the nature of the 
feelings. Into the mouth of Adonis, repelling 
the advances of Venus, he puts these two stan- 
zas : 



RIPENESS. 6'J 

"Call it not love, for love to heaven is fled, 
Since sweating lust on earth usurped his name, 
Under whose simple semblance he hath fed 
Upon fresh beauty, blotting it with blame ; 
Which the hot tyrant stains, and soon bereaves, 
As caterpillars do the tender leaves. 

" Love comforteth like sunshine after rain, 
But lust's effect is tempest after sun ; 
Love's gentle spring doth always fresh remain, 
Lust's winter comes ere summer half be done. 
Love surfeits not, lust like a glutton dies ; 
Love is all truth, lust full of forged lies." 

Venus and Adonis^ if not a great poem, 
has in it the seeds of greatness. Ltccrece 
is greater, deeper, more mature, palpitating 
with power, flooded with the overflow of genial 
abundance. It is an early black cloud sur- 
charged with lightning, that announces afar 
off Z^^r and Othello, Venus and Adonis , 
decked with the rosy clouds and glittering 
dews of morning, cheery with rural sights 
and sounds and movements, is the harbinger 
of As You Like It. In these two brilliant 
poems the great master of tragedy and com- 
edy is trying and tuning the youthful instru- 
ments of his immense orchestra. 

Nor were these two poems, as we now read 
them, the pure product of a youthful mind. 



68 SHAKESPEARE. 

First written, probably, between his twentieth 
and twenty-second years, they were first given 
to the public in his thirtieth and thirty-first. 
Can we believe that their author, now pointed 
at, with admiration or envy, in London as a 
dramatic poet of note and growing fame, would 
in 1593 publish, and dedicate to Lord South- 
ampton, a poem written ten years earlier by 
his unpractised pen, and not first subject it to 
close revision ? In this revision, by a mature 
hand, of an immature work, there would not 
fail to be numberless emendations, additions, 
subtractions, expansions, contractions, letting 
in more light here, heightening or mellowing 
the poetic color in places,, enlivening while 
polishing the style, deepening this passage, 
softening this epithet, rejecting that, — in 
short, giving to a crude production of a youth, 
just out of his teens, the full benefit of the re- 
vising pen of an experienced artist of thirty. 
What thus applies to Venus and Adonis ap- 
plies to Lucrece, published the following year, 
1594, and likewise dedicated to the poet's 
young friend, Southampton ; and applies with 
still more force, because Lucrece is a more 
ambitious work, and also because of the great 
immediate popularity of Venus and Adonis. 



RIPENESS. 69 

In both there are, it seems to me, indications 
that a trained proficient artist has studiously- 
revised the stanzas of a young, powerful, exu- 
berant poet : they bear evidence of the prac- 
tised touch of artistic thoughtfulness. This 
adds vastly to their biographical interest. 

More autobiographical than the two revised 
youthful poems are the Sonnets. In these 
Shakespeare speaks directly of himself. What 
the Sonnets are has, I think, been discovered 
by Charles Armitage Brown, who published in 
1838 a volume entitled, Shakespeare's Auto- 
biographical Poems ; Being his Sonnets clearly 
developed: with his Character Drawn chiefly 
from his Works. This valuable volume is 
dedicated to Walter Savage Landor, to whom, 
in 1828, at Florence, Mr. Brown made known 
his important discovery. 

They are not, properly speaking, sonnets (a 
sonnet being a completed, independent poem 
of fourteen lines), but poems in the sonnet 
stanza. Mr. Brown has deciphered that these 
poems are six in number, of about twenty-five 
stanzas each. The first five are addressed to 
W. H., that is, plausibly concludes Mr. Brown, 
to William Herbert, afterwards Earl of Pem- 
broke, nephew to Sir Philip Sidney. To Pern- 



70 SHAKESPEARE. 

broke and his brother Philip, Earl of Montgom- 
ery, Heminge and Condell dedicated their first 
folio edition of Shakespeare in these em- 
phatic words : " But since your Lordships have 
been pleased to think these trifles something 
heretofore, and have prosecuted both them^ and 
THEIR AUTHOR LIVING, wUh SO much favoT ; we 
hope (that they outliving* him, and he not hav- 
ing the fate, common with some, to be execu- 
tor to his own writings) you will use the same 
indulgence towards them you have done- unto 
their parent. " The words in parenthesis give 
countenance to Mr. Brown's opinion, that it 
was Shakespeare's purpose to edit his works 
himself. Heminge and Condell, his personal 
friends, were cognizant of his plans. What an 
unconscious confession of the opinion and the 
blind ignorance of the day is the phrase " these 
trifles," applied to plays which are now es- 
teemed the most weighty and brilliant treas- 
ures of all literature. 

Mr. Brown, it seems to me, is justified in 
saying of his interpretation and division of the 
sonnets that " This key, simple as it may ap- 
pear, unlocks every difficulty, and we have 
nothing but pure, uninterrupted biography." 
He divides them as follows : — 



RIPENESS. 71 

" First Poem. Stanzas i to 26. To his 
friend, persuading him to marry. 

" Second Poem. Stanzas 27 to 55. To his 
friend, who had robbed the poet of his mistress ^ 
forgiving him. 

" Third Poem. Stanzas 56 to "jj. To his 
friejtd, complaining of his coldness, and warn- 
ing him of lifes decay. 

" Fourth Poem. Stanzas "jZ to loi. To his 
friend, complaining that he prefers another poet' s 
praises, and reproving him for faults that may 
injure his character. 

"Fifth Poem. Stanzas 102 to 126. To his 
friend, excusing himself for having been some 
time silent, and disclaiming the charge of incon- 
stancy. 

"Sixth Poem. Stanzas 127 to 152. To his 
mistress, on her infidelity." 

If any cold thoughts that the reader may 
have, caused by the subject of the sixth poem, 
are not melted by charity and gratitude, let him 
recall the pregnant words of the great poet him- 
self : " The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, 
good and ill together ; our virtues would be 
proud if our faults whipped them not : and our 
crimes would despair if they were not cher- 
ished by our virtues." " 



72 SHAKESPEARE. 

These poems were probably written between 
the years 1597 and 1606, that is, when Shake- 
speare was at the height of his dramatic activ- 
ity. Moods in the writer and aptness in the 
subject always affect poetic execution, and 
thence there are marked inequalities among 
the stanzas ; but most of them are alive with his 
thoughtful, poetic life, and some of them rise 
to the full Shakespearean height. Even were 
there not other internal and biographical evi- 
dence of their origin, these latter of themselves 
suffice to shatter the shallow doubts that now 
and then have been started as to their author- 
ship : no other poet of that day could have writ- 
ten them, so packed are they with thought, so 
centrally lighted with the red heat of poetry. 

Dante calls thirty-five the mezzo del cammin, 
the half-way year, reckoning, with the Psalmist, 
seventy as the healthy term of human life. 
Were it not wiser to call forty-five the half- 
way year, reckoning, not from birth, but from 
t^\ 3nty, when consciousness is ripened and man- 
hood begins t This would be treating man less 
as animal and more as an intellectual spiritual 
being. Sudh better treatment of him is by no 
means yet prevalent in Christendom, where, 
besides the metaphysical materialism (if the 



RIPENESS. 73 

conjunction of these two words be not a sol- 
ecism) so common among the higher educated, 
there obtains an almost universal practical ma- 
terialism, men looking upon animal enjoyments 
and material externalities, not as being during 
earth-life a necessary foundation, a secondary 
adjunct, but as the chief purpose of living, the 
richest source of happiness, the main motive for 
exertion, an estimate of life which, mistaking 
the mortal means for the immortal end, dead- 
ens hope, lowers the tone of human feeling, de- 
prives life of its deeper sweetness, and makes 
of it a lengthening series of disappointments, — 
an estimate born of groveling practice, against 
which, in these greedy, ambitious times, ser- 
mons and psalms are as effective as would be 
the shouts of an engineer to arrest his head- 
long locomotive. 

In Shakespeare's day the fugacious advan- 
tages of youth appear to have been not less 
prized than at earlier epochs. Was there in 
this a trace of the Pagan influence of the Re- 
naissance, so powerfully felt in the sixteenth 
century ? One might think so, were it not 
that all through Christendom, at the present 
day, is conspicuous the same over-estimation 
of the transitory. 



74 SHAKESPEARE: 

As these sonnets were circulated in manu- 
script in 1806, most of them were probably 
written before Shakespeare's fortieth year. 
The sixty-third, in the middle of the poem, 
" warning his young friend of life's decay, " is 
likely to have been produced some years be- 
fore he had reached forty; and yet, in it he 
speaks of himself as already ,0'erworn by age. 
This sonnet is otherwise biographically valua- 
ble as one of several which proclaim with calm 
confidence that his pen will preserve his friend's 
memory forever. 

LXIII. 

" Against my love shall be, as I am now, 
With time's injurious hand crush'd and o'erworn ; 
When hours have drained his blood, and fill'd his brow 
With lines and wrinkles ; when his youthful morn 
Hath traveled on to age's steepy night ; 
And all those beauties, whereof now he 's king 
Are vanishing, or vanished out of sight, 
Stealing away the treasure of his spring ; 
For such a time do I now fortify 
Against confounding age's cruel knife, 
That he shall never cut from memory 
My sweet love's beauty, though my lover's life : 
His beauty shall in these black lines be seen. 
And they shall live, and he in them still green." 

The sixty-sixth reminds us of Hamlet's sui- 
cidal soliloquies ; written probably while he was 



RIPENESS. 75 

busy with that masterpiece. It reveals a mood 
to which Shakespeare's poetic sensitiveness 
made him Kable in those years, a mood, — far 
from being one of his deepest and best, — when 
the superfiCiaUties and artificiahties and hypoc- 
risies and injustices and meannesses and gross- 
nesses of the world took him unawares, when 
his nerves were relaxed, and, descended from 
his poetic citadel, he was not able to repel, with 
the shafts of spiritual insight, the shower of 
thrusts from the coarse and crude and false 
side of humanity. The wounds were the more 
galling from the very sensibility which, when 
it was high-strung by creative impulse, sped 
his vision through these obscurations of the hu- 
man spirit, making of them subjects for hope- 
ful smiles rather than for despondent groans. 
But what compression, what pith in every one 
of the eleven lines that specify the abuses of 
the world : 

LXVI. 

" Tired with all these, for restful death I cry ; — 
As, to behold desert a beggar born, 
And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity, 
And purest faith unhappily forsworn, 
And gilded honor shamefully misplaced, 
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted, 
And right perfection wrongfully disgraced, 
And strength by limping sway disabled, 



^6 SHAKESPEARE. 

And art made tongue-tied by authority, 
And folly (doctor-l!ke) controlling skill, 
And simple truth miscall'd simplicity, 
And captive good attending captive ill ; 
Tir'd of all these, from these would I begone, 
Save that to die I leave my love alone." 

In these - biographically precious sonnets 
many sides of the man are undesignedly re- 
vealed. Shakespeare's poetic organization 
was so dramatic, that to get their best out of 
his marvelous faculties he needed the stir and 
momentum of dramatic precipitation, the lively 
interaction of scenic dialogue. In his dramas 
he exhibited what the highest drama demands, 
that subtle faculty of getting closer to the 
marrow, more intimate with the heart, of a 
thought, sentiment, or personage, than other 
poets. Milton, for instance, is, in comparison, 
aloof and intellectual. Still, as this profound 
power results from the closest union among 
several rare literary qualifications, intensity of 
feeling, instantaneous ignition by contact of 
feeling with intellect, instantaneous enfolding 
in words of the light thus kindled, his undra- 
matic work will not fail to give tokens of the 
power whose original source is creative fire in 
the poet's soul. 

The motive force of Shakespeare, as of every 



RIPENESS. 77 

poet, comes- from interior warmth, a heat at 
the core, strong enough to set the whole man 
aglow, and thus impart fervor and flexibility to 
the intellect, which by itself is cold. In the 
sonnets this warmth often manifests itself in 
affectionateness. Take the following (a little 
overstrained, according to the fashion of the 
day, which Shakespeare had not yet outgrown) 
as an example of his loving disinterested- 
ness : 

LXXI. 

" No longer mourn for me when I am dead, 
Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell 
Give warning to the world that I am fled 
From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell : 
Nay, if you read this line, remember not 
The hand that writ it ; for I love you so, 
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot, 
If thinking on me then should make you woe. 
Oh ! if (I say) you look upon this verse, 
When I perhaps compounded am with clay, 
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse. 
But let your love even with my life decay ; 
Lest the wise world should look into your moan. 
And mock you with me after I am gone." 

Conscious of his powers, still more conscious 
of his integrity and his manliness, and feeling 
his essential superiority to men higher placed 
on the social scale than it was his lot to be, 



78 SHAKESPEARE. 

Shakespeare was wounded by the public opin- 
ion which stamped his histrionic calling as dis- 
reputable ; and having, no doubt, at times 
proofs of this damnatory opinion brought un- 
comfortably home to him in the assumptions 
and pretensions of acquaintance, gave relief to 
his wounded sensibility .through a sonnet in 
which there is humility as. well as plaintive 
protest. When we now read this sonnet, in 
the warmth of our sympathy we are startled 
into wonder at the contrast between the de- 
spised, struggling actor, heaving in the soli- 
tude of his chamber from the midst of his con- 
temporaneous obscurity this sigh of despair, 
and the towering, honored, revered man, to 
whom on two continents statues are raised, 
about whom books are multiplied more and 
more in his own and other languages, in token 
of the admiration, the gratitude, the venera- 
tion felt by the most enlightened of all coun- 
tries : 

CXI. 

" Oh ! for my sake do you with fortune chide, 
The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds, 
That 'did not better for my life provide 
Than public means, which public manners breeds ; 
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand ; 
And almost thence my nature is subdued 



RIPENESS. 79 

To what it works in, like the dyer's hand. 
Pity me, then, and wish I were renew'd, 
Whilst, like a willing patient, I will drink 
Potions of eysel 'gainst my strong infection ; 
No bitterness that I will bitter think. 
Nor double penance, to correct correction. 
Pity me, then, dear friend, and I assure ye, 
Even that your pity is enough to cure me." 

In another sonnet he once more sends forth a 
protest against the injustice and slander of 
those whose tongues disparaged him ; and the 
whole educated world thanks him cordially for 
this insight into his dear interior. What proud, 
firm self-assertion ! " I am that I am : " 

cxxi. 

" ' T is better to be vile, than vile esteemed, 
When not to be receives reproach of being ; 
And the just pleasure lost, which is so deemed, 
Not by our feeling, but by others' seeing : 
For why should others' false, adulterate eyes 
Give salutation to my sportive blood ? 
Or on my frailties why are frailer spies. 
Which in their wills count bad what I think good ? 
No, I am that I am ; and they that level 
At my abuses, reckon up their own : 
I may be straight, though they themselves be bevel. < 
By their rank thoughts my deeds must not be shown ; 
Unless this general evil they maintain. 
All men are bad, and in their badness reign." 

People sometimes give away presents not 



8o SHAKESPEARE. 

without self-reproach. From his friend Shake- 
speare received a memorandum-book, which 
he gave to another. In the next sonnet to the 
one just quoted he subtly apologizes for the 
act. C. Armitage Brown reasonably suggests 
that the book was too fine for use : 

CXXII. 

" Thy gift, thy tables, are within my brain 
Full character'd with lasting memory, 
Which shall above that idle rank remain. 
Beyond all date, even to eternity ; 
Or, at the least, so long as brain and heart 
Have faculty by nature to subsist ; 
Till each to raz'd oblivion yield his part 
Of thee, thy record never can be miss'd. 
That poor retention could not so much hold, 
Nor need Italics thy dear love to score ; 
Therefore to give them from me was I bold, 
To trust those tables that receive thee more. 
To keep an adjunct to remember thee, 
Were to import forgetfulness in me." 

From an earlier sonnet we learn that he had 
presented his friend with a blank book for 
writing down what could not be trusted to 
memory. Thence may be inferred that he 
kept such a book by him for his own stray 
thoughts. If that book could be recovered ! — 

" Look, what thy memory cannot contain. 
Commit to these waste blanks, and thou shalt find 



RIPENESS. 8 1 

Those children nurst, deliver'd from thy brain, 
To take a new acquaintance of thy mind." 

The quick flight of time, the fruitlessness of 
"honoring the outward," the transitoriness of 
the world's shows, are thoughts that many pas- 
sages in his plays and poems prove to have 
been often in Shakespeare's mind. Feeling 
the force of the temptation to flatter the pres- 
ent moment, to satisfy appearances at the cost 
of truth, he thus, at the close of a sonnet ad- 
dressed to Time, fortifies himself with a re- 
solve : 

" Thy registers and thee I both defy, 
Not wondering at the present, nor the past ; 
For thy records and what we see do lie, 
Made more or less by thy continual haste. 
This I do vow, and this shall ever be, 
I will be true, despite thy scythe and thee." 

Such- fortifying Shakespeare needed less 
than most men, for falseness could not get 
hold of him. His brain was a palace "for the 
crowned truth to dwell in." He was held to 
fidelity of fact and feeling by a twofold bond, 
by reason, clear intellectual perception, and by 
a spiritual love of truth. It may be said that 
the fullness and completeness of his mental 
equipment involved the perception and the 
6 



82 SHAKESPEARE. 

choice of truth. Truth is the law of being ; 
falsehood is a breach of law. The best-en- 
dowed man will be most in harmony with the 
laws of being, with the deep principles im- 
planted in nature, for the maintenance and 
success of nature. Intuitively he will " think 
the thoughts of God." Shakespeare knew, as 
few men know, both how to, reason and how 
to feel. Through his quick sympathy with 
life truth streamed in upon him from all sides, 
giving depth and vivacity to his faculties. 

How clearly he perceived the evil of one- 
sided passion, passion perverted, as it is when 
we "mix us too freely with our dust," and how 
forcibly he could describe it we have evidence 
in Sonnet CXXIX, Of Shakespeare's insight 
into human feeling, his grasp and pertinence 
of thought, his plastic command of expression, 
his condensation, energy, rapidity, and the 
sparkling vividness of his page, in short, of his 
multiform ability, hardly in his greatest trage- 
dies will be found a more glowing exemplifica- 
tion than this intense sonnet : 

CXXIX. 

" The expense of spirit in a waste of shame 
Is lust in action ; and till action, lust 
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame. 



RIPENESS. 83 

Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust ; 

Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight ; • 

Past reason hunted, and no sooner had, 

Past reason hated, as a swallowed bait. 

On purpose laid to make the taker mad : 

Mad in pursuit, and in possession so ; 

Had, having and in quest to have, extreme ; 

A bliss in proof, — and prov'd a very woe ; 

Before, a joy proposed ; behind, a dream. 

All this the world well knows, yet none knows well 

To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell." 

Divided, according to the interpretation of 
Armitage Brown, into a series of six poems, 
the sonnets become a most valuable autobio- 
graphic record, — a record, in certain passages, 
painfully interesting. Shakespeare's convic- 
tion of his undying renown, distinctly uttered 
in several of the sonnets, is proclaimed, as by 
a triumphant blare of trumpets, in two, which 
are wholly given up to this proclamation. Lis- 
tening to these, the blood tingles with the so- 
norous grandeur of the verse, rejoicing with 
still warmer bound to have such assurance 
that our gifted benefactor knew how great he 
was, how prized to be. Here is one of the 
two : 



LV. 



" Not marble, nor the gilded monuments 
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme ; 



84 SHAKESPEARE. 

But you shall shine more bright in these contents 

Than unswept stone, besmear 'd with sluttish time. 

When wasteful war shall statues overturn, 

And broils root out the work of masonry, 

Nor Mars his sword, nor war's quick fire shall burn 

The living record of your memory. 

'Gainst death and all oblivious enmity 

Shall you pace forth : your praise shall still find room 

Even in the eyes of all posterity. 

That wear this world out to the ending doom, 

So, till the judgment that yourself arise, 

You live in this, and dwell in lovers' eyes." 

This is the mighty Shakespeare speaking of 
himself appropriately. When in 1609 the son- 
nets were printed, this one may have raised 
some smiles and some sneers, as the flowering 
forth of a sovereign self-complacency ; for then, 
and for several generations, only the writer of 
it knew what he was. But now that we have, 
by slow degrees in the past hundred years, 
been taking a more faithful. measure of his co- 
lossal proportions, we discover that in him was 
simple modesty what in any of his contempo- 
raries would have been a thrasonical brag. 

Some years before Shakespeare wrote the 
first sonnets, he was at work on the third part 
of Henry VI. As Gloster is there the predom- 
inant personage, and as Shakespeare, through 
the apprenticeship of improving the first and 



RIPENESS. 85 

the second parts of Henry VI., and mostly writ- 
ing the third, discovered what a promising soil 
English history is for dramatic culture, Richard 
IH. was produced in 1593 or 1594. Having in 
Henry VI. and Richard III given the rise and 
fall of the House of York, he turned back to 
Richard II. to give the rise of the House of 
Lancaster. King yohn, the earliest chronolog- 
ically, antedating by a century the opening of 
the Lancastrian series, was written later, and 
Henry VIII. much later. 

Shakespeare did not dedicate several of his 
most vigorous poetic years to the illustration of 
English history, but he illustrated English his- 
tory by tragic dramas, because English history, 
in the periods he treated, is peculiarly apt for 
dramatic presentation. It is thus apt, from the 
personal qualities of several of the kings, from 
the vigor and ambition of their powerful subor- 
dinate nobles, from the comparative limitation 
of the scene of action, from the primitiveness 
of habits and racy contrasts between classes, 
from the breadth and strength and courage of 
the mass of the population, by the means of 
whom, and for the sake of ruling over whom, 
the contestants were roused to battle. There 
was then, as there always has been, a breath of 



86 SHAKESPEARE. 

freedom blowing through, and nerving the wills 
of the English people, impelling them to have 
a choice and a voice in who should rule them ; 
and this breath is an inspirer of poetry. 

Only a great poet can draw out of an his- 
toric epoch a genuine drama ; for he alone has 
the selective power to group the dramatic per- 
sonages, and the illuminating power to make 
each one shine with individual light. An ele- 
ment too of his greatness must be philosophic 
thought, that is, thought which, penetrating far 
below surfaces, grasps fundamental principles. 
Were the world of man, whether individual or 
national, not subject, in all its manifestations, 
to law, and supremely to moral law, it could 
not shape itself into consistency. History only 
grows into being through the prosperous activ- 
ity of formative intellectual and moral princi- 
ples ; and the poet who will dramatically repro- 
duce history, having to deal with the deepest 
and broadest motive powers, must cherish in 
his heart warm sympathies with the best in 
man. Thus only can he gain the insight to 
comprehend him in action, and to portray him 
poetically. 

That Shakespeare could reanimate history, 
or recorded fact, with the spirit of poetry is 



RIPENESS. ^y 

crowning evidence of his human and his ar- 
tistic potency. In him the poetic idealist was 
rooted in the stout Enghsh realist, thence the 
combined solidity and beauty of his historical 
work. In handling the Richards and the Hen- 
rys, the idealist breathed into them a soul that 
made them buoyant and luminous, while the 
realist held them to the earth, filling their ar- 
teries with prosaic but lively blood, which gave 
them their command as Kings over English- 
men of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. 
Those whom he handles he revivifies, and this 
he does by bringing out the latent spirit of 
humanity into attractive presence. With a 
holier anointing he reconsecrates certain Kings 
of England. Even the bloody crown of Rich- 
ard III. he makes to glisten with a splendor 
that outdazzles the cold fero.^'^^y of that mon- 
ster. The kings upon whom has been laid his 
glorifying hand are a privileged dynasty. He 
has greatened the greatest of them. With his 
immortal pen he has so burnished the Plantag- 
enets that they alone look majestical ; all the 
others seem under partial eclipse, opaque and 
pale, as though they were hastening to oblivion. 
To write only the English historical plays 
implies and requires some learning and much 



8S SHAKESPEARE. 

knowledge. Hollinshed and other chroniclers 
and writers were the sources of the learning ; 
and we may be sure that Shakespeare read 
every book within his reach that bore upon any 
subject he was treating; but books in that age 
comparatively with this, were scarce, and — 
except the very few native classics, Chaucer, 
Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney — crude and igno- 
rant. The chief source of the vast and extraor- 
dinary knowledge displayed in this historic se- 
ries was his own marvelous brain. 

A man gets his learning chiefly from with- 
out, from the kingdoms of nature, inspected by 
his intellect or reported and recorded for him 
by- others ; his knowledge he gets chiefly from 
within, from his intuitions, from his capacity 
of insight into things and persons. Now 
Shakespeare was all compact of intuitions ; and 
thence, though there have been men far more 
'learned than Shakespeare, never one had so 
much knowledge. He knew the wealth and 
motions of the human heart ; he knew the scope 
and keenness of the intellect. The concretions 
of these fiery elements into men and women, 
he knew with such discernment, that his many 
personages are in their vivid personality as 
though God-created. Men, as they stir in his- 



RIPENESS. 89 

tory and society, he knew how to combine into 
such passionate groups, that from his incarna- 
tions we learn the secrets of our own bosoms. 
Such was his knowledge of things and men, 
that his sentences are braces of wisdom for 
the invigoration of sages ; such his knowledge 
of words, that his page is the dictionary of 
scholars ; such his knowledge of beauty, that 
from his verse the tints and perfumes of nat- 
ure gather freshness.-^ 

When Shakespeare, before the age of thirty, 
began to be talked of " about town " and at the 
theatres as a rising dramatist, envy — whose 
inflamed eyes glisten most venomously in the 
excruciating glare of a new radiance — writhed 
painfully, and then spit at him her foulest bile. 
All the men of talent, and those with some gen- 
ius, were alarmed ; for in the port and speech 
of the new-comer there was that which an- 
nounced more than a common competitor. The 
offensiveness of this intrusion was aggravated 
by the gross fact that the intruder was one of 
the untitled laity, nothing but an un graduated 
Philistine : he had no university degree. The 

1 The above paragraph I have borrowed from a small vol- 
ume published more than twenty years ago : Introduction to 
Social Science. 



90 SHAKESPEARE. 

other leading dramatists were university men. 
Ben Jonson, many years after, when, on Shake- 
speare's decease, he bore almost generous tes- 
timony to his genius, wondered, no doubt, that 
he had grown to such stature, seeing that he 
had "little Latin and less Greek." Stalwart 
Ben had too much Latin and Greek, that is, 
more than he had inward juice to assimilate, 
his " classic " learning coming away from him 
in undigested lumps. Had Shakespeare hap- 
pened to have taken in more Latin and Greek 
than even Jonson himself, it would have been 
thoroughly fused and incorporated, turned first 
into healthy chyle, then into blood, his learning 
mixing with, melted into, knowledge, and his 
knowledge kept nimble by use, strengthened 
and enlarged by new currents from within and 
without, especially from within. 

In 1572 died Robert Greene, author of a 
Hejiry VI., which Shakespeare had lately 
worked over. Greene left in manuscript a work 
entitled A Groafs worth of Wit, bought with a 
million of repe7itance. Three months after 
Greene's death this work, purporting to have 
been written during his last illness, was pub- 
lished by Henry Chettle, also a dramatist. The 
book was prefaced by an address from Greene : 



RIPENESS. 9 1 

"To those gentlemen, his quondam acquaint- 
ance, who spend their wit in making Plays." 
The following is the important part of the pas- 
sage in this address which relates to Shake- 
speare : " There is an upstart crow, beautified 
with our feathers, that with his Tiger s heart 
wrapped in a player s hide, supposes he is as 
well able to bombast out a blank-verse as the 
best of you : and being an absolute yohannes 
Fac-totu7n, is in his own conceit, the only Shake- 
scene in a country. Oh ! that I might entreat • 
your rare wits to be employed in more profita- 
ble courses, and let these apes imitate your past 
excellence, and never more acquaint them with 
your admired inventions." 

Among the dramatists of that day there ap- 
pears to have been something like a commu- 
nity of literary goods. Each one appropriated 
to his present use whatever suited his purpose. 
The practice must have been generally counte- 
nanced, and not deemed dishonest. There is 
no uncertainty, we believe, as to the priority 
of Greene in Henry VI. Some critics ascribe 
the first Henry VI. jointly to Marlowe, Greene, 
and Peele. Except on this theory, we cannot 
account for Shakespeare's having seized upon 
Greene's handiwork and headwork during 



92 SHAKESPEARE. 

Greene's life, and by his imposed partnership, 
while shaping his neighbor's scenes into less 
prosaic forms, saving himself much labor. No 
wonder that poor Greene in his last moments 
fired a shot at the " upstart crow." Greene 
was probably one of the least poetical among 
his contemporary dramatists ; his name is not 
among the twenty-five whom Lamb thought 
worthy of being included in his Specimens. 
Shakespeare, in this case as in others, looked 
upon as legal booty whatever he by his touch 
could improve. He thus availed himself of an 
intellectual and literary right, that any fact or 
material, no matter where found, is open to the 
use and appropriation of him who has the gen- 
ius to turn it to best account. 

Charles Lamb, in a note to a passage from 
Decker on the Happy Man, says : " The turn 
of this is the same with lago's definition of a 
Deserving Woman, * She that was ever fair and 
never proud' etc : the matter is superior." 

The lines put into lago's mouth, if they be 
not in weight of matter equal to those of Deck- 
er, are less prosaic and are perfectly suited to 
their place. Lamb jumps at any opportunity, 
by a choice passage or scene, to bring, if only 
for a moment, one of the *^ Contemporaries " to 



RIPENESS, 93 

the side of Shakespeare. To show fully what 
they all are combined, in comparison with 
Shakespeare, an effective way would be to ex- 
tract from Shakespeare's plays the same kind 
and quantity of passages and scenes that Lamb 
has culled from the best plays of twenty-five 
dramatists. We should then have a convincing 
v^iew of the difference between the ever radi- 
ating and ever sparkling glow of a mass heat- 
ed from within by deep unintermitted heart- 
warmth, intensified while refined by poetically 
imaginative light, and the fitful shooting forth 
of flame from a mass less interiorly heated, and 
more lighted by the superficial play of fancy 
than by inward beams of poetic imagination. 
And this contrast is heightened by the thought, 
that for the one mass the warmth is supplied 
by a single mind, in the other by more than a 
score of minds. 

To me it has always seemed that the " old 
dramatists" contemporary with Shakespeare 
have been, and continue to be, overrated. Cole- 
ridge, seventy years ago, and Mr. Swinburne, 
recently, are the brilliant poetic representatives 
of this overestimation. The late revival of in- 
terest in them is commendable ; for, whatever 
may be the final enlightened judgment as to 



94 SHAKESPEARE. 

their intrinsic worth, they have a high historic 
value. Editions of several of the most cele- 
brated have been issued. Certain scholars and 
book-buyers put these on their shelves ; but 
what is the proportion of readers to buyers t 
Among the few who read them, who reads 
them twice .'' You grant a certain importance 
to them as acquaintance, but you are not drawn 
into intimacy with them. You cannot make 
a friend of any of their personages. These lack 
refinement, and individuality, and wholeness, 
and a still greater bar to your taking one of 
them into your heart for a lifelong friend, — 
they themselves lack heart. 

In every department of human endeavor, all 
through the annals of mankind, supreme men 
are very rare. It is not surprising, therefore, 
that but one man of that strong age should 
have had the divine plenitude of power that 
Shakespeare had. As for his contemporaries, 
the best of them want the deep basis of dramatic 
competency, — lively, sure, moral sense. With 
this, and partly as effect of this, is want of 
refinement. Moreover, in comparison with 
Shakespeare, they want both intellectual nim- 
bleness and intellectual reach. They want — 
and this is their most damaging want — spirit- 



RIPENESS. 95 

uality, and that which spirituality helps much 
to unfold, — poetic imaginativeness. And 
thence, they want freedom of movement In 
them you find little gracefulness, which comes 
of an inward sense of poetry and proportion in 
combination with delicate sentiment. They 
have not that which is a mark of sure, solid 
mental power, they are not symbolical, signifi- 
cant, broadly generic. Nor have they that 
which gives to mental power its efficiency, 
namely, artistic mastery. Of them it cannot be 
said, as ^of many poets, that they have more 
art than inspiration. Here again Shakespeare 
is supreme, his judgment and his artistic tact 
being equal to his genius. 

In that age fashion and profit drove all 
poets, and would-be poets, to the drama. Out 
of thirty who wrote plays probably not ten 
had dramatic gifts. This want we discover 
through Shakespeare, who has given us so 
lofty a poetic and dramatic standard, that he 
becomes our foremost teacher of aesthetic prin- 
ciples and mysteries. 

Of most literary aspirants want of heart 
may be called the most frequent and intrinsic 
want, causing countless failures and half suc- 
cesses. Many writers are ever striving for the 



96 SHAKESPEARE. 

impossible, that is, to make. the intellect do the 
work of the sensibilities : as vain as to expect 
roses to spring into bloom out of the frost- 
bound mold of February. The intellect, that 
most exquisite and most potent of tools, is 
cold as an icicle, passionless as the blade that 
gleams in the hand of the humane surgeon or 
in that of the brutal murderer. The moving 
force behind it, the eager energy that wields 
and rules it, is the heart. We say the heart ; 
but this is a figure of speech for the feelings. 
In the heart are the deeps whose storms con- 
vulse the being of 'man, and at times shake 
society out of its poise. The poet who would 
portray the convulsions must have these deeps 
in his own heart, — withheld in him from 
destructive upheaval by his moral sense, and 
directed to constructive ends bv his aesthetic 
sense. What the capaciousness of that heart 
out of which could come forth the single play 
of JuliiLS CcBsar ! We behold in his colossal 
proportions, though depicted in a few pages, 
the " mighty Julius," to whom it seemed " most 
strange that men should fear." Brutus and 
Portia stand together before us in the first 
scene of Act ii., with such vividness that flesh- 
and-blood friends are scarcely more audible 



RIPENESS. 97 

and visible, with such beauty that they can 
never tire us, and with such pathos that our 
affections ever yearn towards them. The 
heart whence issued that one scene is deep 
and strong, and tender, and manly, and wo- 
manly. 

From this single dialogue between Portia 
and Brutus might be deduced the first law of 
the " Literature of Power," as De Quincey 
calls it in contradistinction to the '^ Literature 
of Knowledge." In the literature of power, 
the higher literature, the aim is to move : it 
always appeals to the feelings. And by this 
great simple scene what feelings are moved ! 
love, admiration, sympathy, each of them trans- 
fused with the healthiest fragrance of the beau- 
tiful. It cannot be too often repeated that 
Art — and than written poetry there is no 
higher fine art — can produce its genuine, its 
pure, effects, only through the beautiful. In 
Art the feelings must show themselves at their 
best, aesthetically clarified, spiritually refined ; 
and none but the poet can effect this refine- 
ment, and he only through his finer capacity 
for the ideal. How deep and rich shall be the 
material he exalts through this capacity de- 
pends on the warmth, largeness, depth of his 
7 



98 ^ SHAKESPEARE. 

heart, that is, of his sensibilities. By means 
of the cooperative union of these high qualities, 
and through faith in the feelings he depicts, 
he becomes productive, creative ; for poetry is 
affirmative, religious, not negative, not skepti- 
cal. Your Mephistopheles, the denier, is in- 
capable of poetry, which, therefore, he despises. 
Hence, he takes to criticism, and being one- 
sided, through want of the upper side, he 
makes sad work, the sadness of which he can- 
not perceive. In this department of literature 
there are even Calibans, who, while they would 
be the equals of Prosperos, will, for the strong 
drink of flattery, or for greasy pelf, kiss the 
feet of Stephanos. 

Aye ; poetry is affirmative, religious, be- 
cause its source is in the heart, not in the 
head; that is, in the emotional part of our won- 
derful and composite organism, not in the in- 
tellectual. Subservient to the heart is the in- 
tellect, and when, itself strong and agile, it 
serves a large heart poetically inspired, it per- 
forms its most brilliant feats. It then soars 
highest and delves deepest, has access to the 
grandest vistas, insights into subtlest secrets ; 
so that a Shakespeare, ranging in finer at- 
mospheres, his knowledge is rhore precious 
than even that of a Bacon. 



RIPENESS. 99 

Take the opening scene of Macbeth, intro- 
duced by thunder and lightning. The inter- 
locutors are three Witches ; these, after eleven 
short lines, vanish. These eleven lines, which 
seem low, fantastical, are deep with meaning. 
They come out of Shakespeare's heart, not out 
of his intellect : they are a birth, not a mere 
contrivance or manufacture. Brooding on his 
great theme, the poet goes to the bottom of 
his soul for the material needed for its outfill- 
ing. Whether he believes in such hags or 
not, he believes in perverted passion, and that 
is what he has to exhibit in its most terrific 
manifestation ; and as poet he uses for his pur- 
pose the popular belief in witches, making 
them represent the dark desires, the carnal 
lusts, of the human heart. They prefigure the 
motive force of the tremendous drama in its 
most cruel, most damnable, form, murderous 
selfishness. Short as is the scene, it is an 
overture to the whole play. Mere intellect, 
the most ingenious, the most powerful, could 
not write a line of it ; it is a flowing out of the 
profound sensibility that could harbor in its 
bosom Macbeth and his wife and all their fear- 
ful being. Out of his feeling of the whole 
tragic subject, the poet, the artist, wrought 



100 SHAKESPEARE. 

this short scene to predenote the quality of 
the sublime poem. 

The poem is sublime through the deep, 
glowing warmth at the core of its maker, 
warmth molding the vast material into suita- 
ble shapes under the plastic play of consum- 
mate artistic feeling, which, besides the re- 
sources of a large, tender -heart, has at its 
service the instrumentality of a keen, potent, 
agile intellect. Without overstraining, one 
might make the lightning, wherewith the 
witches are announced, symbolic of the whole 
play, — of all Shakespeare's plays. The light- 
ning that is in them gives them their enduring 
life. Lightning is believed to be the motive 
force, the very constituent, of life. It is the 
essence of literary life. To the literary man 
the primary inborn need is warmth, especially 
to the poet. The poet must have excess of in- 
ternal heat. But, mark you, not animal heat 
only, but emotional heat, genial, steady warmth 
to temper and purify the animal heat. This 
inward warmth it is that imparts to Shake- 
speare's verse its rapidity, its irresistible ani-' 
mation, its unfading charm. A subtle superi- 
ority of Shakespeare lies in his mastery of the 
logic of feeling. He makes one feeling grow 



RIPENESS. 10 1 

out of another in a natural and lively continu- 
ity. This feature, in the degree he exhibits it, 
is a peculiarity of Shakespeare. It might be 
termed his art of spiritual joinery, whereby, 
through genial glow, innumerable elastic artic- 
ulations and delicate connections are created 
and adjusted. In this fi.ne work he is chiefly 
aided by his command of metaphor. 

What is a metaphor } A short similitude, 
a similitude in a single word, an implied com- 
parison, a transference of quality from one 
thing to a different. All this the dictionaries 
tell you, and, true as it is, a metaphor is more 
than all this. A metaphor is the flashing per- 
ception (or rather, an effect of the perception) 
of one of the countless links that bind all thb 
constituents of the universe into unity. An 

• 

infinite network of similitude holds all things 
with indissoluble ties, and Shakespeare's men- 
tal grasp is at once so large and so fine that 
he seizes an exceptional quantity of the threads 
of this network, and so is enabled to make his 
pages sparkle with the flames kindled by fig- 
ures of speech, especially by the most compact 
of figures, metaphor. 

The faculty of perceiving likenesses is purely 
intellectual, and while it is a potent instrument 



102 SHAKESPEARE. 

when wielded by the poet, it is the chief power- 
in science, being the source of classification 
and a main element in all generalization. 

Of Shakespeare's judgment, tact, sense of 
fitness, knowledge, and especially pDetic in- 
sight, we find brilliant exemplification there 
where one would hardly think of looking for 
it, — in his plots and personages taken from 
original sources, Hollingshed, Plutarch, Italian 
tales, Belleforest, and others. Through his 
intuitions, his knowledge, his sensibility, he 
heightens, deepens, beautifies the personages 
he adopts, modifying, regrouping them, refresh- 
ing them with new desires, cheering them with 
new companions. Thus, into a pleasant Ital- 
ian story he incorporates his own Falstaff and 
breathes into the scenes and characters such 
an English life, that the whole has the air of* 
his own invention, so that no one would sus- 
pect that the delightful rich comedy of The 
Mej'ry Wives of Windsor was not entirely, 
from root to shining leaves, of native English 
growth. Out of a long diffuse novel by Lodge 
he creates As yoti Like it, adding several char- 
acters, among them Jaques and Touchstone. 
Sometimes, with his firm, easy grasp and or- 
ganizing talent, his fondness for a broad field 



RIPENESS. 103 

and doubly-weighted plot, he works up two 
different stories into one play, as in Lear and 
the Merchant of Vefiice, Othello is taken from 
a novel by Cinthio ; and whoever has wondered 
at the depth and clearness of characterization, 
at the art and subtlety of dramatic evolution, 
in this powerful drama, will not have his ad- 
miration lessened by learning from the novel 
how raw and rudimental is the material out of 
which, through the magic wheel of genius, 
were spun the golden threads that are inter- 
woven in this profound poem. 

A most exquisite and an instructive literary 
enjoyment it is, to watch, going on before your 
eyes, the work of artistic creation ; to see prose 
transmuted into poetry, the flat into the sig- 
nificant, the loose into the compact, the horri- 
ble into the terrible. Through the intense 
vivacity of Shakespeare's nature, successive 
scenes, and the parts of each scene, are knit 
closely together, enchained by the logic of 
passion. As in human nature so in Shake- 
speare, in a scene of feeling he is always near 
to the pathetic. And all his scenes have on 
them those stamps of power, — beaming life, 
expression, sinuous movement. In this he 
and his contemporary Rubens, were alike. 



104 SHAKESPEARE. 

Both owed it, secondarily, to the eager stir of 
the times acting upon large, warm, responsive 
natures. In both, intellectual activity was by 
daily intercourse with their fellows ever fresh- 
ened, instead of being deadened ; and this 
was because of their sympathies, which stimu- 
late and feed curiosity. - 

In a man of such large calibre and fine en- 
dowment as either of these, there are two in- 
dividuals, the idealist and the realist, the 
thinker and the doer, the poet and the man; 
and upon the ready interchange of friendly 
offices between the two, the subtle interlock- 
ing of one with the other, depend in large 
measure the fruitfulness and validity of either 
the poet or the man. The poet needs to be 
steadied and consolidated by the common 
sense of the man, and the man, in order to ex- 
pand and become elastic, needs the aspiration 
of the poet and the insight conferred by his 
finer susceptibility. The closeness of the 
union between the two individuals in Rubens 
gave to the work of the artist and to the work 
of the man much of their grandeur and effi- 
ciency. Even more palpable in Shakespeare's 
work is the intimacy of this union. The whole 
varied product of his mind is^ a brilliant exem- 



RIPENESS. . 105 

plification of the necessity,- for thorough man- 
hood, of the warm co-working between the 
realist and the idealist. This cordial partner- 
ship empowered him to give such play to his 
faculties that their product constitutes him the 
supreme poet of the world, the highest, most 
important of Englishmen. Owing to this ever- 
present ideal in his reality, his pages are over- 
hung by a wide, high, pure, airy heaven, just 
as the pictures of Rubens are ; and there is 
nothing smothery about the presentations of- 
either : open to heaven, they have a boundless 
breadth of fresh air about them. 

Where this ideal power does not make its 
buoyant atmosphere felt, we suspect a play of 
having been wronged or badly mutilated before 
it came into the printer's hands, or of not be- 
ing but partially by Shakespeare. In the be- 
ginning of his career he rewrought the scenes 
of others ; but he would hardly do this towards 
its close. What, then, shall we think of Ti- 
mon ? His most enlightened commentators 
place Timon among his latest dramas. 

To me Timon is a failure, and therefore but 
partially Shakespeare's. Not much of his 
hand is traceable, it seems to me, until the 
fourth Act. The whole delineation lacks 



I06 SHAKESPEARE. 

depth. Rather than the earnestness of trag- 
edy its characterization exhibits the caricature 
of melodrama. If Timon be not an impossible, 
he is an uninteresting, character. He is like 
a youth who, after being spoilt by over-indul- 
gence, is so shallow that he cannot be chas- 
tened by misfortune ; he is hardened by it 
into snarling selfishness. To me there is 
crudeness in the whole play, and a lack of 
poetry. It is unknit, disjointed. Especially 
is there no fine blending of the real and ideal, 
such as there must have been in one of the 
mighty master's latest finished dramas. Ape- 
mantus is right when he tells Timon his is 
*' a poor unmanly melancholy." Timon is a 
big baby. The spirit of Shakespeare does not 
shine through the characters. Shakespeare is 
always warm and always intellectual. In Ti- 
mon there is only a tepid warmth, and the in- 
tellectuality is, therefore, not steeped in deep 
pools of feeling. 

On closing Timon, open The Tempest, among 
the last, if not the very last play he wrote. It 
is like passing suddenly from twilight in a des- 
ert to sunlight in the valley of Tempe. In 
The Tempest we have the most luminous ideal 
together with the most juicy real, the two so 



RIPENESS. 107 

closely, so healthily interblended, that we al- 
most feel as if heavenly nature were outdone ; 
— possibly she is, for here is an unsurpassed 
exhibition of what heavenly genius can do. If 
Hamlet represents Shakespeare in his restless, 
interrogative, impassioned young manhood, 
Prospero represents his matured manhood, 
with its mellowed knowledge, its benignity, its 
intellectual potency, its moral cheerfulness, its 
humane wisdom, the grandeur of its spiritual 
power. 

In the death of Falstaff — one of those un- 
expected tender passages one is liable to come 
upon in Shakespeare — we have another con- 
spicuous illustration of the crowning of realism 
with the lustrous diadem of the ideal. Who 
would ever think of hearkening to Dame Quick- 
ley to seize some of the most pathetic words 
ever written. That such words do issue from 
her mouth is proof of the greatness of Shake- 
speare's art, which knows how to be natural, 
and knows that to be as unconventional as 
nature is the attainment of highest art. 

When, at the end of the second part of 
Henry IV., poor Falstaff is dismissed by the 
new king with a severe frown and cutting 
words, we are lifted to the kingly elevation 



I08 SHAKESPEARE. 

suddenly reached by a spring which Henry 
was empowered to make by the strength and 
loftiness of his nature. As the young king 
had " turned away his former self/' it was fit- 
ting that he should turn away " those that 
kept him company." The memory of how 
they had flattered his idle, sensual, youthful 
tendencies added some sternness, no doubt, 
to his rebuke, especially towards Falstaff, " the 
tutor and the feeder of his riots." To a young 
man with the intellectual superiority of Prince 
Henry, Falstaff was the only one who could 
have misled him, or, rather, helped him !o mis- 
lead himself ; and this, though " so surfeit- 
swelled, so old and so profane," Falstaff did 
through the power of wit. His wit made his 
intellectual ingenuity sparkle with an attract- 
iveness so fascinating to us, as. well as to the 
Prince, that we have an aesthetic enjoyment in 
his very exhibitions of selfishness. By his 
creative puissance Shakespeare hag imparted 
to Falstaff a personal magnetism that makes 
the fat Knight irresistible. 

In that withering last address, which must 
have astounded Falstaff like a thunderclap out 
of a cloudless sky, the new King says to him : 

" Know, the grave doth gape 
For thee thrice wider than for other men.*' • 



RIPENESS. 109 

Nevertheless, within that mound of superfluous 
flesh there dwelt a tender human soul ; for, 
this treatment of him by his quondam regal 
boon companion, '* killed his heart." So, he 
had a 'heart to break. Mrs. Quickley, Bar- 
dolph, and company were not his mere h'angers 
on for the sake of his knighthood and his wit : 
they loved Sir John. Such as they don't love 
a heartless man. That, selfish and sensual, 
he was not utterly hard and incurable, his 
death-bed also shows. From the touching 
description of his death by Hostess Quickley 
some commentators would snatch the most 
significant flower from the wreath she lays 
upon his grave, substituting a prosaic phrase 
for '' 'a babbled of green fields.^' By these 
words, fat, sinful old Jack of Eastcheap is 
transfigured into innocent little boy Jack of 
the country, whereby sympathy is awakened 
to such a degree that our imagination is lured 
to follow him through his purgation in the 
after-life. The out-swollen bulk of the loose 
liver dissolves, and in its place uprises the 
image of innocence. The soul ever travels 
back to its primitive pure state, however long 
and arduous may be the journey. This is the 
inalienable privilege of its divine birth. Nor 



no SHAKESPEARE. 

does there exist on the earth a soul so black- 
ened; but at its core there is a spark divine 
enough to finally purify and redeem it. 

That we so follow Falstaff is a token that, 
like Bardolph and Mrs. Quickley, we, too, have 
got to love old Jack, in spite of his sins. 

Shakespeare, a magnetic man, who drew 
other men to him by the fascination of his 
presence and his speech, went to London in 
his twenty-second or twenty-third year ; grew 
there so famous that he achieved even a ma- 
terial success until then unparalleled in litera- 
ture ; retired early to his native rural town of 
Stratford on Avon ; lived there an honored, 
prosperous citizen, and died on the 23d of 
April, 1 616, in his fifty-third year. But did 
we know twenty times as much as this of his 
outward earthly life, what were it to what we 
know, and know with restful certitude, of the 
heavenly inward being of the man. Whom 
of our fellow-men do we know if we know 
not him out of whose one brain issued Ham- 
let and Lear and Macbeth and the Merchant 
of Venice and Romeo and Juliet and Othello 
and As You Like It and Twelfth Night and 
Midsummer Night's Dream and the kingly 
Richards and Henrys and Julius Ccesar and 



RIPENESS. 1 1 1 

• 

Anthony and Cleopatra and Cymbeline and 
The Tempest^ "What a piece of work" is 
such a man ! What an ideal of human mental 
power ! What an individuality for the expan- 
sion and elevation of the standard of man's 
capacity ! How grandly and tenderly popu- 
lous .must have been that large, deep, vivipa- 
rous brain ! During those years of productive 
activity, how many hours and days of ecstatic 
delight, of joy unspeakable, to this peerless 
benefactor, while he was molding in the glow 
of thought, and consecrating with the precious 
oil of poetic genius the scores and hundreds 
of divers and distinct human individualities, 
whom, by the force of a superearthly imagina- 
tion he launched into the world to live and 
move among us forever, our dear, constant, 
most wholesome, most instructive companions ! 
Think what a divine existence here on the 
earth this man must have led while nursing in 
his great heart Kent and Cordelia, Hermione 
and Perdita, Posthumus and Imogen, Juliet 
and Romeo, Hamlet and Prospero, and all the 
other immortals who, through a long series of * 
years, came forth in such rapid succession that 
they jostled one another as they grew up in 
their happy, gorgeous nursery, fed there by 
the lig^ht of that single brain. 



1 1 2 SHAKESPEARE. 

A law, a profound, a benign law of our being 
it is, that every blessing we bestow upon others 
is a blessing to ourselves. The love that flows 
out of us in benefaction weaves a warming 
halo of smiles around our own life ; while self- 
love, flowing inward, becomes a smoldei;ad fire 
without radiance, around which crouch uitrest 
and ennui, scorns and hates and coldnesses, 
that darken the daily being of ourselves and of 
those nearest us. Blessings, like curses, come 
back to roost at home. Our real recompenses, 
as our real punishments, grow from within our- 
selves, hereafter as well as here. A deep truth 
it is that the mind makes its own heaven or 
hell. What a heaven must have been the mind 
of Shakespeare, dedicated to such exalted be- 
neficence. 

That the beneficence was indirect weakens 
not its virtue. His mental progeny would 
not, could not, have had that soundness and 
sprightly health and beauty and fascination 
that make them a joy and an education, had not 
their creation been steadily presided over by 
those spiritual and moral powers, according to 
the degree of whose regency is a life sound and 
effective. Besides the active presence of these 
highest human faculties, general fullness and 



RIPENESS. 113 

richness of endowment was indispensable to 
Shakespeare for -the performance of his unique 
part as myriad-minded dramatist, as mouthpiece 
of humanity, as poet in whom were married 
yEschylus and Aristophanes. That, in the pres- 
ent imperfect organization of society, this full- 
ness exposed him to the lapses and unhappr- 
nesses of common men, was even a means of 
strengthening and deepening his moral con 
sciousness through the testimony of personal 
experience. At the same time, be it observed, 
the great poet needs not practical, personal ex- 
perience in order to depict passion or crime. 
Exceptionally gifted with feeling, he has a con- 
sciousness of its capabilities, and thus can 
faithfully reproduce a Macbeth or an Imogen, 
an lago or an Isabella. Through his lively 
sympathies he can come near enough to the 
abyss to look into it : had he fallen in, he could 
not have described it so poetically, that is, so 
truthfully. He had set foot among the haunts 
of Falstaff, and he had acquaintance with the 
temptation of Anthony; but for no 'Cleopatra 
would he have ever forfeited the sovereignty 
of the poetic world, a sovereignty which, with 
all his poetic and intellectual power, depended 
ultimately on the depth and wholeness of his 
8 



1 14 SHAKESPEARE. 

spiritual and moral sensibilities, that is, on the 
greatness of his heart. 

This greatness of heart constitutes the con- 
trolling greatness of the foremost leaders among 
men, the leaders in action as well as in thought. 
But for his moral greatness we should have had 
nt) Washington. Nay, by that great congress 
of 1775 he would not have been chosen com- 
mander-in-chief, had not his reputation been 
so high for honor and integrity. His military 
achievement had as yet been limited (fighting 
Indians under Braddpck), nothing by itself to 
entitle him to the chief command ; but for 
forty-three years he had been growing in wis- 
dom, — and the sole matrix of wisdom is moral 
feeling, — and he had established a character 
for uprightness. But for this, honest John 
Adams, a leader in that august assembly, 
would not have been the first to point to Wash- 
ington as the fittest man for chief command. 
All through those seven years of patriotic 
trial his great heart confirmed the leadership 
first won by it ; aye, in moments of deepest 
depression, it was the love and confidence uni- 
versally felt towards him, by the army, the 
Congress, the people, that made the continu- 
ance of that indispensable leadership possible. 



RIPENESS. 115 

Through the tenor of his whole Hfe, with its 
high achievement, he is the choice exemplar of 
the practical, as Shakespeare is of the poetic, 
ideal. 

We go back more than twenty-two hundred 
years for the ethical ideal, and we find it in the 
greatest man of the Pagan world, a man who, 
through greatness of heart, towered above the 
many giants who are the glory of his small 
Athenian land. Socrates, solidly self-centered, 
not self-seeking, moved by love for man and 
love for truth, wrought for the moral and intel- 
lectual improvement of his fellow-citizens. He 
did his high work by speech. Ever talking 
and ever seeking to lead whom he talked with 
to higher subjects, he never tried or wished to 
impose his opinions on any one, but strove to 
unfold what is true for all. A man he was 
most just, most loving, most disinterested, 
most pious, a man whose ideal of duty was so 
lofty and so binding that, on the trial for his 
life, he scorned to have recourse to the cus- 
tomary devices of defense, for fear of violating 
the laws, and, from the same sense of loyalty, 
refused, after his sentence of death, to escape 
from prison. Through the uplifting, liberating 
power of spiritual divineness and moral self- 



1 16 SHAKESPEARE. 

command, Socrates was a freer man than any 
pagan of his matchless epoch, and than most 
Christians of our day, so free and strong that 
he eminently illustrates the deep, the sublime 
truth recently uttered by a ' great thinker : ^ 
" Man is not an object of fate ; he is fate itself 
organized. He is not merely under law, but 
he is law ; he is law arisen into self-cognition 
and volition." 

To complete the vast, splendent circle of 
human capabilities, one more ideal is needed, 
the spiritual ; and as all else grows out of 
spirit, the spiritual ideal ranges above the 
others. By his words and his works Jesus of 
Nazareth is the archetype of the spiritual ideal. 
In him so active was the spiritual vitality, his 
whole being was so translucent with celestial 
light, that during his brief sojourn on earth he 
seemed like a visitant from the transearthly 
sphere, — an angel who out of love for his 
earthly fellow-men, took up his abode among 
us In his mind there was nothing earthy. 
Neither in word nor in deed was there a 
thought of self. When he healed the sick, or 
uttered simple but profoundly wise precepts of 
conduct, he gave forth spiritual ideals too lively 

1 Selden J. Finney. 



RIPENESS. 117 

with celestial life to be apprehended by those 
about him ; and they continue to be too high 
to be apprehended by all in their full trans- 
earthly bearings and beautiful significance. .By 
deed as well as by word he taught that the 
highest human act is to efface the self and 
give yourself to others. Such words and such 
deeds imply a consciousness of spiritual suffi- 
ciency that empowers the speaker and doer to 
be the spiritual, the religious, ideal, ^nd prove 
the bond between earth and heaven, between 
man and God. And thus, the most important 
act in the momentous life of Jesus was his ap- 
pearing to his disciples after the crucifixion. 
This reappearance meant, the bond between 
God and man, between heaven and earth, is not 
broken by the body's decease ; man is a spirit, 
and there is no death. 

These ideals run into each other : each one 
involves in some degree all the four. The 
practical ideal implies, rests upon, the moral 
ideal ; and a large-minded doer, like Washing- 
ton, in performing his many duties, will be 
strengthened by spiritual or religious sensibil- 
ity, and, aiming always at the best, will feel the 
sway of the poetic ideal. His life is a poem, 
which all men should study. Socrates, striv- 



1 1 8 SHAKESPEARE. 

ing to make men better, felt himself the better 
for submission to divine will. Love one an- 
other, be just, is the burden of Jesus' teaching : 
be true and clean and merciful and humble, 
and you have a foretaste of heaven ; for the 
kingdom of heaven is within you. But it will 
not be within you, it cannot stay within you, 
if you habitually break the moral law. On the 
poetic ideal many of the luminous words of 
Jesus are- an inspiring commentary, while his 
self-sacrificing life was a beautiful, sublime, 
tragic poem, carrying in it, like every high 
poem, a deep moral lesson. 

Now, more than any of the others, the poetic 
idealist — especially if he be the many-sided, 
myriad-minded man that Shakespeare was — 
needs, in the execution of his literary task, to 
embrace in large measure all the others; for 
being, through his myriad-mindedness, the po- 
etic spokesman of mankind, his conceptions, 
descriptions, characterizations require him to 
harbor in his brain the practical, the moral, the 
spiritual ideal, in order that he may, in situa- 
tions, in combinations, in personages, present 
the multifarious vivid pictures of human life 
which we have in his teeming pages. A poet, 
with an endowment so cornpact and brilliant, 



RIPENESS. 



119 



mellows the poetic ideal into the human ideal, 
not by embodying perfected human beings, — 
in this first stage of man's career such prema- 
ture embodiments would suffocate in our dense 
earthly air, — but by making each individual 
embodied so true, at once to nature and to 
himself, that he becomes a type, and thus pre- 
sents the astonishing union of vital individual- 
ity with generic breadth, a union which attests 
the highest poetic achievement, an achieve- 
ment whose distinction consists in causing the 
soul of the personage represented to shine 
through his speech and his conduct. To ac- 
complish this is the exclusive privilege of gen- 
ius, of poetic genius, which alone has the inte- 
rior light to illumine the depths of being, and 
thus make transparent in the individual generic 
characteristics. 

Close upon these archetypal representatives 
of the highest in humanity follow others, whose 
large intellects were likewise so enhghtened 
by disinterested aspiration, that they enjoy a 
similar immortality of gratitude and love as 
tutelary pioneers of their fellow-men. These 
let the reader select for himself ; but were I 
to indicate by name a score of these gifted, 
high-hearted workers, these deep souls, in the 



I20 SHAKESPEARE. 

list would not be included four of the most 
prominent, brilliant, weighty names in history, 
those of Alexander, Csesar, Cromwell, Napo- 
leon. These men were great, not through 
greatness of heart, but solely through greatness 
of head. However dominant the parts they 
play in human affairs, whatever precedence 
they be entitled to as controlling factors in the 
evolution of history, they have no place in the 
love of mankind. 

Our love towards Shakespeare for the great- 
ness of his heart is equal to our admiration of 
the greatness of his head. To him were given, 
in brimming and equal measure, power of in- 
tellect and power of feeling ; and finest sensi- 
bility to the beautiful, linking these in cooper- 
tive action, concentrated and refined his deep 
mental currents into Art. 

When we are enraptured and exalted by the 
unsurpassed artistic grandeur and beauty of 
The Te^npesty and wonder ever anew at the un- 
tamed vigor, at the poetic splendor of Cymbe- 
lme,3ind know — in so far as evidence internal 
and external may be trusted — that these are 
among the latest of Shakespeare's works, we 
ask ourselves, why did this strong, clear, fresh 
current cease to flow, how could it cease ? 



RIPENESS. 121 

Their author had not yet reached his fiftieth 
year. Shakespeare began life as a poor man, 
had suffered some of the bitterness of poverty ; 
his work of twenty-five years had made him 
rich. What ! is genius subject to such vulgar 
influences ? Not that ; but wealth gave him 
rest before the spring of his mind had begun 
to feel any relaxation of its fibre. The facul- 
ties that gave birth to The Teinpest were not 
outworn. Yet, their work was done. And 
what work ! Well might he pause. His mind, 
though far from exhausted, may have felt that 
it had given forth its best, and enough. 
Shakespeare was finite. It is pretty well as- 
certained that during the last three years of his 
life Shakespeare produced nothing. Respected, 
esteemed, beloved, he spent these years amid 
family and friends in his large, comfortable 
house in Stratford on Avon, the small, rural 
town where he was born and brought up. In 
calm and content he enjoyed relief from the 
toil and turmoil of London. Independent and 
prosperous, through his own efforts, his mind 
daily glorified by the memory of the work it 
had accomplished, the quality of the work im- 
parting to his consciousness the fragrance of 
its beauty, the illumination of its splendor, this 



122 SHAKESPEARE. 

rare benefactor of his race was blessed in his 
latter years on earth with a unique happiness. 
He passed away without looking into old age. 
The pressure and clog of age he might not 
have felt, had he reached seventy instead of 
fifty-three, for the poetic nature is not so liable 
as the prosaic to bend under the earthly weight 
of time. Its springiness and creative vivacity 
keep the mind young, and open to new influ- 
ences, to fresh sensations. In full possession 
of his incomparable faculties, Shakespeare went 
from the earth to resume, in a more spiritual 
World, his mental activity amid angelic com- 
peers. 



III. 

KING JOHN. 

Reading lately King John^ it seemed to me 
that I had never before enough admired this 
tumultuous prophetic prologue to the grand 
series of Shakespeare's historic dramas. In 
its rhythm there was a deeper music than ever, 
in its reflections a wider range, in its sentiment 
a wiser truth, its grandeur as a whole was 
more imposing. Like the earth's air, Shake- 
speare is inexhaustible ; like the air, he renews 
himself from infinite reservoirs. At every 
contact with him we inbreathe fresh life. 

One of his richest plays in passages of power. 
King yohn is more dramatic than most of the 
historic dramas ; that is, the individuality of 
its personages brings about its collisions, and 
shapes their issues, more distinctly than in the 
others, in which the strongest wills, dominated 
by historic fatality, are swept on in a resistless 
epic current. Elinor, Pandulph, King John, 
Hubert, Philip of France, Constance, Lewis, 



124 SHAICESPEARE, 

Salisbury, — here is a company of lively dra- 
matic agencies. And then, besides the collis- 
ions of individuals, there is the direct terrible 
collision of kingdoms ; while, through his ac- 
tive personality, the colossal Faulconbridge 
sways the whole movement, literally uplifting 
the entire action on his Herculean shoulders. 
Faulconbridge is one of the supreme splendors 
of Shakespeare, one of those ideal realities in 
which is most vividly exhibited the creative 
genius of this mighty mind. 

In the first thirty lines of the opening scene 
are epitomized the drift and substance of the 
whole play. 

SCENE I. — Northampton. A room of state in the palace. 

Enter King^OYi.-^ , Queen Elinor, Pembroke, Essex, Salis- 
bury, and others, with Chatillon. 

K. John. Now, say, Chatillon, what would France with us ? 

Chat. Thus, after greeting, speaks the king of France, 
In my behaviour, to the majesty, 
The borrow'd majesty of England here. ^ 

Eli. A strange beginning ! — borrow'd majesty ? 

K. John. Silence, good mother ; hear the embassy ! 

Chat. Philip of France, in right and true behalf 
Of thy deceased brother Geffrey's son, 
Arthur Plantagenet, lays most lawful claim 
To this fair island, and the territories ; 
To Ireland, Poictiers, Anjou, Touraine, Maine : 
Desiring thee to lay aside the sword, 



KING JOHN. 125 

Which sways usurpingly these several titles, 
And put the same into young Arthur's hand, 
Thy nephew, and right royal sovereign. 

K. John. What follows, if we disallow of this ? 

Chat. The proud controul of fierce and bloody war, 
To enforce these rights, so forcibly withheld. 

K. John. Here have we war for war; and blood for blood, 
Controlment for controlment. So answer France. 

Chat.- Then take my king's defiance from my mouth, 
The furthest limit of my embassy ! 

K. John. Bear mine to him, and so depart in peace ! 
Be thou as lightning in the eyes of France ; 
For ere thou canst report, I will be there, 
The thunder of my cannon shall be heard. 
So, hence ! Be thou the trumpet of our wrath, 
And sullen presage of your own decay. 
An honorable conduct let him have : — 
Pembroke, look to 't ! Farewell, Chatillon ! 

\Exeunt Chatillon and Pembroke. 

Eli. What now, my son ? have I not ever said, 
How that ambitious Constance would not cease, 
Till she had kindled France, and all the world. 
Upon the right and party of her son ? 
This might have been prevented and made whole 
With very easy arguments of love, 
Which now the manage of two kingdoms must 
With fearful bloody issue arbitrate. 

K. John. Our strong possesions, and our right, for us, 

Eli. Your strong possession much more, than your right ; 
Or else it must go wrong with you, and me. 
So much my conscience whispers in your ear ; 
Which none but heaven, and you and I, shall hear. 

How natural all this is, and easy, how un- 



1 26 SHAKESPEARE. 

avoidable ! Each speech seems to carry the 
very words the speaker ought to utter ; each 
speaker says just what he should say, neither 
more nor less. In poetry (and in prose too) 
that is the difficult thing to do ; and, to do it, 
to say on every occasion, .under all circum- 
stance, what admits of being said, what is fit- 
test, what the conditions of the moment require 
to be said, to accomplish this superlatively well, 
is Shakespeare's capital distinction. This dis- 
tinction he achieves by virtue of the vast vol- 
ume and briskness and purity of his mental 
currents, the combined amplitude and fineness 
of his faculties. Apt handling of words, skill 
and force in expressing, this is the literary gift. 
In this Shakespeare excelled ; but the lustre 
and efficacy of the gift could be fully mani- 
fested only through wealth and variety in the 
power behind it, in the sparkling play of the 
multitudinous brain of Shakespeare. Judge of 
the significancy and wonder of speech hereby, 
that Shakespeare has been discovered to be the 
subtle, gorgeous, myriad-minded genius that 
he is solely through his words. 

Observe how this opening scene is enlivened 
by the interruption of Elinor : " A strange be- 
ginning! borrowed majesty ?" an interruption 



KING JOHN. 127 

which Shakespeare would not have allowed her 
to make, had she not, in making it, given a 
strong taste of her quality as a proud, grasping, 
intermeddling Queen-dowager. While adding 
life to the scene, the line she utters character- 
izes herself. Shakespeare thus kills two birds 
with one stone, and both game birds, a pro- 
ceeding which he repeats oftener than — I 
had almost said — all other poets put together. 
What a double-edged weapon is his pen, the 
instrument of such penetrating thought, of 
such a far-ranging keen perception ! 

The plan and movement of the whole piece 
being succinctly prefigured in the first scene, 
the second presents to us the protagonist of 
the play, the stalwart champion of England, a 
very prototype of English independence, 
strength, humor, earnestness, pluck. History 
makes slight mention of Faulconbridge. A 
natural son of Richard Coeur-de-Lion there 
was who fought in John's French wars, and 
who is one of the dramatic personages in an 
older play of King John which Shakespeare 
largely used ; and a prose romance about a 
Lord Faulconbridge was early published. Our 
Faulconbridge is a child of Shakespeare, and 
one of his most vigorous offspring. No crea- 



1 2 8 SHAKESPEARE. 

tion of his is more deeply stamped with the 
fiery mark of his plastic potency. 

The Sheriff of Northamptonshire enters, and 
having whispered Essex, Essex speaks : 

" Essex. My liege, here is the strangest controversy, 
Come from the country to be judg'd by you, 
That e'er I heard. Shall I produce the nien ? 

K. John. Let them approach ! — \_Exit Sheriff. 

Our abbies and our priories shall pay 
Re-enter Sheriff, with Robert Faulcon bridge, iz^^ Philip, 

his bastard brother. 
This expedition's charge. — What men are you ? 

Bast. Your faithful subject I, a gentleman. 
Born in Northamptonshire, and eldest son, 
As I suppose, to Robert Faulconbridge, 
A soldier, by the honor-giving hand 
Of Cceur-de-lion knighted in the field. 

K. John. What art thou ? 

Rob. The son and heir to that same Faulconbridge. 

K. John. Is that the elder, and art thou the heir ? " 

The dialogue that follows is an outburst of 
the exuberant mental power there is in Faul- 
conbridge. Like a warm, fertile shower upon 
thirsty fields is this sudden downpouring of 
the Shakespearean opulence and masterly crea- 
tiveness. The reader does not wonder when 
the king exclaims : 

" K. John. Why, what a madcap hath heaven lent us here ! 
Eli. He hath a trick of Coeur-de-lion's face, 
The accent of his tongue afFecteth him. 



-\ 



KING JOHN. 129 

Do you not read some tokens of my son 
In the large composition of this man ? 

K. John. Mine eye hath well examined his parts, 
And finds them perfect Richard. — Sirrah, speak, 
What doth move you to claim your brother's land ? " 

This exhibition of racy humor and peerless 
art of characterization we are prohibited from 
reproducing here by the plainness of speech 
required for such a discussion of paternity, a 
plainness broadened by the freedom of that 
age, and, it may be added, by the temptations 
of wit. 

Shakespeare is almost uniquely illustrious 
for two qualities, delicacy of feeling and depth 
of feeling. The bane of literature is its super- 
ficiality, palpable in much of the verse and 
prose of all ages, and especially notable lat- 
terly in the unceasing flood of pretentious nov- 
els, which one might suspect are easily pro- 
duced, so easily are they forgotten. 

This very scene, somewhat gross as it una- 
voidably is, exemplifies Shakespeare's delicacy, 
— that refinement of feeling which is an en- 
dowment indispensable to high attainment in 
art. In his admirable commentary on Shake- 
speare, Gervinus refers to several passages in 
the old play that were modified by Shakespeare 
in the spirit of this refinement. 
9 



I30 SHAKESPEARE, 

On the same page Gervinus writes : " Shake- 
speare delineates his Faulconbridge (and him- 
self in him)." In this, it seems to me, the 
eminent German critic says too much. He 
could hardly mean to affirm that in Faulcon- 
bridge Shakespeare drew his ow^n portrait; 
and yet, his words will bear that construction. 
To contract himself into any one of his per- 
sonages is an impossibility to Shakespeare. 
The fuller and greater the character, the more 
of himself will there be in it, as in Faulcon- 
bridge, Henry V., Prospero, Hamlet ; but in 
all his work the great objective artist ever 
presides imperially, condescending never to 
one-sided, egotistic self-portraiture. His works, 
the whole of them together, enfold his full 
many-sided autobiography. He is in Sir Toby 
Belch as in Shylock, in Dogberry as in sweet 
Anne Page, in Desdemona as in Lear, — an 
omnipresent, poetic creator who veils his per- 
sonality behind his creations. The every-day 
man, William Shakespeare, the husband and 
father and neighbor, was very like other men, 
and as such approachable and scrutable ; but 
the poet, the poetic maker, dwelt on a plane 
high above that of the taxable citizen, the* cus- 
tom-ruled individual, joyed in a beatific sphere 



KING JOHN. 131 

inaccessible to worldly footsteps. Those most 
in sympathy with him catch glimpses of his 
supernal movement, but none can tell how he 
brings about his marvels : nay, he himself 
could not tell. The mysterious poetic pro- 
cedure is inscrutable even to its possessor; it 
flows out of a spiritual infinitude, and it has 
no discernible or imaginable personality. This 
profound, aesthetic principle might suggest 
something to theological speculators, a class 
who are much prone to making God after their 
own image. 

The controversy between the two Faulcon- 
bridges is settled as follows : 

^^Eli. Whether hadst thou rather be a Faulconbridge 
And, like thy brother, to enjoy thy land : 
Or the reputed son of Coeur-de-lion, 
Lord of thy presence, and no land beside ? 

Bast. Madam, and if my brother had my shape, 
And I had his, Sir Robert his, like him : 
And if my legs were two such riding-rods, 
My arms such eel-skins stuff'd; my face so thin, 
That in mine ear I durst not stick a rose, 
Lest men should say. Look, where three-farthings goes ! 
And, to his shape, were heir to all this land. 
Would I might never stir from off this place, 
I'd give it every foot to have this face ; 
L would not be Sir Nob in any case. 

Eli. I like thee well. Wilt thou forsake thy fortune, 
Bequeath thy land to him, and follow me .'' 
I am a soldier, and now bound to France. 



132 SHAKESPEARE. 

Bast. Brother, take you my land, I'll take my chance : 
Your face hath got five hundred pounds a year ; 
Yet sell your face for five pence, and 'tis dear. — 
Madam, I'll follow you unto the death. 

Eli. Nay, I would have you go before me thither. 

Bast. Our country manners give our betters way. 

K. John. What is thy name t 

Bast. Philip, my liege ; so is my name begun ; 
Philip, good old Sir Robert's wife's eldest sOn. 

K. John. From henceforth bear his name, whose form thou 
bear'st ! 
Kneel thou down Philip, but arise more great ; 
Arise Sir Richard and Plantagenet ! " 

In the interview between the Bastard and 
his mother Shakespeare again gives proof of 
superior refinement and his high quahty as 
artist. In the old play, which supplied so 
much material to his animating mastery, the 
son, in order to draw from Lady Faulconbridge 
the secret of his birth, threatens her life. 
The occasion of the disclosure Shakespeare 
has converted into a humorous scene. 

Shakespeare is the most genial as well as 
the most skillful of literary distillers : he ex- 
tracts the substance out of a vast body of 
loose material, encloses in a phial the essence 
of a flood of fluid, imparting to it in the pro- 
cess of extraction that tonic fragrance which 
naught but poetry exhales. 



KING JOHN. 133 

The scene now shifts to France. The sec- 
ond Act opens before the walls of Anglers. 
France and Austria are allied to uphold the 
rights of the boy Arthur against usurping 
John. They are just about to bend their can- 
non ''against the brow of this resisting town " 
when. Chatillon, the ambassador, returned from 
England, enters and announces that England 
*'hath put himself in arms/' and is close at 
hand. 

The trumpet and the drum always wake the 
warrior in Shakespeare. When he writes of 
battles and precipitated squadrons his verse 
has the bound and swing of cavalry charg- 
ing : there is in it the music of a forest swept 
by a gale. He gives these combatants the 
help of gunpowder at the end of the twelfth 
century. In war cannon is a poetical element : 
its thunderous sound is a token of its might ; 
and so Shakespeare anticipates the terrific 
play of artillery by more than a century. Had 
he been reminded of this he would have an- 
swered : '' I know it, but I am not writing a 
chronological history of inventions." 

The speech of Chatillon is cut short by the 
" churlish drums " of England, and thereupon 
enter King John, Elinor, Bastard, etc. 



134 SHAKESPEARE. 

" K. John. Peace be to France ; if France in peace permit 
Our just and lineal entrance to our own ! 
If not, bleed France, and peace ascend to heaven ! 
Whiles we, God's wrathful agent, do correct 
Their proud comtempt, that beat his peace to heaven. 

K. Philip. Peace be to England ; if that war return 
From France to England, there to live in peace ! 
England we love ; and, for that England's sake, 
With burden of our armour here we sweat. " 

This mutual greeting of the two adverse 
sovereigns, how Shakespearean ! Privileged 
kings, to have such a spokesman ! In music 
and distinction these regal salutations are as 
much above the usual greetings of kings as 
the habitual utterance of Shakespeare's per- 
sonages is above the customary speech of 
men. Shakespeare has been called the Ex- 
presser, and he deserves the designation ; at 
the same time, his diction owes its brilliancy 
and effect to the beauty and weight of the sub- 
stance to be expressed. In his capacious, 
luminous brain he carried more, and more com- 
pact, ideals than were ever carried by man. 
To his words splendor is imparted by the 
unique richness of his deeper resources. His 
words would not uplift us were they not them- 
selves the sun-lit billows of a broad, fathomless 
sea of upmounting thought. This uplifting 



KING JOHN. 135 

function is the divine prerogative of poetic 
genius. Like flame, poetry always ascends. 
It is itself a flame, a flame kindled by the con- 
tact of two feelings, enjoyment and aspiration. 
Its nature is ethereal, and it ever seeks its 
upper home. Poetry is a celestial guest so- 
journing on our earth among mortals, with 
looks and thoughts ever tending to its supernal 
source, and ever striving to bend thitherward 
the thoughts of its earthly hosts. In its es- 
sence the poetical is a spiritual aspiration, a 
yearning for the better, for the best. 

Shakespeare ever breathed the air agitated 
by the soaring wings of poetry. His eye was 
visionary ; that is, while he saw what was be- 
fore him in bodily figure and proportion, he at 
the same time beheld, with poetically-dupli- 
cated vision, that figure and proportion illu- 
minated from within, thus obtaining insights 
into the essential nature of persons and things, 
— insights possible only to the mental eye thus 
poetically armed. He who is not gifted with 
the poetic second sight cannot see the thing 
or person as it is ; he sees but part and that 
the grosser part. The significant glow where- 
with each individuality is encompassed through 
an emanation, a perpetual efilux, from its own 



136 SHAKESPEARE. 

soul, revealing its interior being, is only cog- 
nizable to the spiritual glance whetted on the 
poetic. 

Much has been said of Shakespeare's knowl- 
edge, and justly said ; his acquisition through 
experience and observation and reading was 
immense, but the deepest source of his knowl- 
edge was intuition ; and this affluent intuitive 
gift it was that made his experience and read- 
ing effective ; nay, his intuitions enlarged and 
strengthened and purified his experience, aye, 
created much of it. This highest order of 
mental action, the intuitive, clings occasionally 
to intellectual genius, but the widest, wealthi- 
est field of its agency is feeling, — feeling 
through the emotional capabilities. By his 
exceptional inborn endowment with emotional 
sensibility, Shakespeare is the supreme Eng- 
lishman. He need not to have had more in- 
tellect than Bacon, or Kant, or Daniel Web- 
ster ; his superiority to them is in the deeper 
pulsations of his soul, sympathetic to the eter- 
nal beat of the human heart ; in the intensity 
of his fellowship with enjoying, suffering hu- 
manity. His grandeur, his power, his fineness 
as poet, rest on his fullness and fineness of 
feeling, as their foundation and store-house. 



KING JOHN. 137 

Hence Shakespeare's truthfulness. A rare in- 
tellect, the instrument of richest, tenderest 
sympathies, does its noble work with such 
completeness, that truth — the instinctive de- 
sire of man, and his incomparable possession 
— is seized in an infinite variety of forms. 
As the quantity and quality of truth a man 
can master and practice, give him his rank on 
the scale of being, judge of the position of 
Shakespeare among men. 

The chief agent in mastering and practicing 
truth is the highest and widest and purest of 
human feelings — love. A man must love a 
thing to do it well : he must love a fellow- 
man to know him thoroughly. Shakespeare 
loved not only Cordelia and Gonzalo,. Brutus 
and Beatrice, he loved Trinculo and Juliet's 
nurse, Bardolph and Sir Toby Belch ; nay, he 
loved Macbeth and King John ; had he not 
loved them he could not have made them live 
as he has done. With his great warm heart 
suffering ''with those he saw suffer," he was 
hereby empowered to suffer imaginatively. 

Here let me (with due deference) protest 
against the oft-quoted dictum of Aristotle, that 
by scenes of pain and agony on the tragic 
stage, through the pity and fear they excite, 



138 SHAKESPEARE. 

the sensibilities of the beholders are purged. 
On the contrary, the beholding of such scenes 
would, as such, be demoralizing and hardening. 
Then, and only then, do they become purifying 
when they are touched and penetrated by the 
transfiguring light, the spiritual light, the di- 
vine light, of the beautiful. -Aristotle's cele- 
brated treatise on poetry places the essence 
of poetry in imitation ; whereas the essence 
of the poetical is not in imitating, copying, 
nature, but in reproducing nature in the spirit 
of the original production, — a reproduction 
which is only possible to a mind so genially 
capable of sympathy with the creative process, 
as to be thereby exalted and inspired to lively 
re-animation, thus becoming, in its sphere, 
maker or poet. Far deeper than imitation is 
this mental action ; it uses imitation as its in- 
strument. In Plato's dialogues are to be met 
with deeper and sounder views on poetry than 
in the formal treatise of Aristotle. Aristotle's 
mind, vast as it was, had by no means so much 
as Plato's of that gift which elevates and en- 
livens and enlightens all other mental gifts : 
he was less of a poet than Plato. 

This gift which exalts and illumines all other 
gifts is the decisive gift in high literature and 



KING JOHN. 139 

fine art ; for art is not fine art except it be 
poetical. It is the idealizing gift, whereby, 
through the insight and synthetic power it im- 
parts, the delineator is enabled to see the per- 
son or thing before him more distinctly ; and 
this, whether what is before him be a flesh- 
and-blood reality or a conception of his brain. 
Thus, the portrait-painter, in order to see his 
subject more thoroughly as he is, needs the 
illumination of this idealizing light. Hereby 
he is empowered to throw a flame into the in- 
terior of his subject and thus bring out into 
clearer individuality the outward features. In 
short, through his idealizing aptitude, he, like 
the delineator with pen, realizes reality more 
truly. He becomes not only a more brilliant 
but a more faithful limner. On the page of 
Shakespeare Anthony and Henry IV. and 
Richard II. and King John stand more vividly 
present than on the page of prosaic history. 
All his personages, all his scenes, all his dia- 
logues, are steeped in this illuminative ideal- 
ization, which perfuses them with its beams 
as the landscape is perfused at daybreak with 
the auroral splendor which makes the earth to 
sparkle in its inborn glory. 

Shakespeare delights in making kings con- 



I40 SHAKESPEARE. 

front each other to bandy high words. In 
the times he depicts kings were not merely 
representative, they were the personal con- 
trollers of national destinies. By their almost 
unrestricted sway they then were real Majes- 
ties, not what they have now become in Europe, 
nominal Majesties. In the scene before us 
where the rival kings, with their royal and 
noble attendants, present a picture of irrecon- 
cilable ambitions and jealousies, the effect is 
deepened by the interchange of sharp, very 
sharp, words between those royal ladies, Eli- 
nor and Constance ; an interchange which is a 
lively type of feminine vituperation, an ideal 
of recriminative give and take. The quality of 
their logomachy may be inferred from the con- 
clusion. 

*' Elinor. Thou unadvised scold, I can produce 
A wili that bars the title of thy son. 

Constance. Ay, who doubts that ? a will ! a wicked will ; 
A woman's will : a canker 'd grandam's will ! " 

That this was the conclusion was owing to 
the French king, who, vexed by "these ill- 
tuned repetitions," exclaims to Constance : 

" Peace, lady ! pause, or be more temperate." 

-■ ' An important figure in the play of King 
John is Cardinal Pandulph, the Pope's legate. 



KING JOHN. 141 

At that period papal power was paramount 
Of Pandulph Shakespeare avails himself to 
represent a typical priest, that is, a man who 
assumes that he is empowered by Heaven to 
be the exclusive, infallible expounder and in- 
terpreter of heavenly things, to guide and rule 
the spirituality of other men, — an assumption 
which, concentrating in itself the guilt of 
usurpation with the iniquity of despotism, is 
a blasphemy towards God and an offense and 
an insult to man. One wonders at the igno- 
minious moral subjection of an age that bowed 
before such tyranny ; but a show of indignant 
scorn at its weakness and superstition is 
checked by the sudden reflection that our- 
selves live in the shadow of this tyranny, 
and that, if incorporated sacerdotalism has, 
through the working of mental emancipation, 
the strengthening and purifying of the individ- 
ual conscience, been shorn of much of its 
authority, its black shadow shortened and 
thinned, still itself has not foregone a tittle 
of its inhuman pretention, and perseveres in 
grasping at supreme control, political as well 
as moral, crippling the wills of men even to 
paralysis, that it may sway their minds, ever 
ravenous of power, its master-passion an un- 
holy ambition. 



142 SHAKESPEARE. 

Writing in the aroused forceful age of Eliza- 
beth, Shakespeare becomes the spokesman of 
English independence, of Protestant manliness, 
and, in a passage quivering with eloquent pa- 
triotism, makes the King of England defy the 
papal legate and his chief. Passages like this, 
— of which there are others in his works, — 
set forth the greatest poet and deepest dram- 
atist of the world as not only the foremost 
.national poet of England, but as the champion 
of Protestantism or free religion. 

" K. John. What earthly name to interrogatories 
Can task the free breath of a sacred king ? 
Thou canst not, cardinal, devise a name 
So slight, unworthy, and ridiculous, 
To charge me to an answer, as the pope. 
Tell him this tale, and from the mouth of England, 
Add thus much more : That no Italian priest 
Shall tithe, or toll in our dominions ; 
But as we under heaven are supreme head, 
So, under him, that great supremacy. 
Where we do reign, we will alone uphold, 
Without the assistance of a mortal hand. 
So tell the pope ; all reverence set apart. 
To him, and his usurp'd authority ! 

K. Phil. Brother of England, you blaspheme in this. 

K. John. Though you, and all the kings of Christendom, 
Are led so grossly by this meddling priest, 
Dreading the curse, that money may buy out, 
And, by the merit of vile gold, dross, dust, • 
Purchase corrupted pardon of a man, 



KING JOHN. 143 

Who, in that sale, sells pardon from himself ; 
Though you, and all the rest, so grossly led, 
This juggling witchcraft with revenue cherish ; 
Yet I, alone, alone do me oppose 
Against the pope, and count his friends my foes." 

Whether the movement be tragic grandeur, 
pathetic tenderness, patriotic fervor, with what 
ease this mighty penman rises to the elevation 
demanded by the occasion. Manly, stirring, 
burning words like these endear Shakespeare, 
with something of the warmth of personal 
affection and gratitude, to Englishmen forever, 
and to those who, in other hemispheres, draw- 
ing originally from that rich island-centre prin- 
ciples of religious and political freedom, enjoy 
as their dearest birthright the privilege of 
learning from their mothers' lips the language 
that Shakespeare spoke and wrote. 

At the conclusion of King John's manly, 
sonorous defiance, when Pandulph excommuni- 
cates and curses him, Constance exclaims : 

" Const. Oh, lawful let it be. 
That I have room with Rome to curse a while ! 
Good father cardinal, cry thou amen 
To my keen curses ! for, without my wrong, 
There is no tongue, hath power to curse him right. 

Fund. There's law and warrant, lady, for my curse." 

How profoundly must the humane, truly 



144 ^ SHAKESPEARE. 

Christian Shakespeare have felt the secret 
irony of this answer of Pandulph to Con- 
stance. Law and warrant for cursing a fellow- 
man ! The bitterness of the fruit proves the 
poison of the ripening sap, — the monstrous, 
unhuman assumption of one man to govern the 
soul of any fellow-man. ' For the curse of poor 
Constance there is some warrant, the war- 
rant issued by the wronged, bleeding heart of 
a mother. 

Constance is another of Shakespeare's won- 
derful ideals that are more real than the his- 
toric report of the reality. She is an everlast- 
ing mouthpiece of maternal agony, an agony 
out of which, to the reader or spectator, the 
sting is taken by the balm of the beautiful. Of 
this surpassing scene, in which acutest afflic- 
tion and grief are clothed with radiance, I 
rnake room for the conclusion : 

" And, father cardinal, I have heard you say 
That we shall see and know our friends in heaven. 
If that be true, I shall see my boy again ; 
For, since the birth of Cain, the first male child, 
To him, that did but yesterday suspire, 
There was not such a gracious creature born. 
But now will canker sorrow eat my bud, 
And chase the native beauty from his cheek, 
And he will look as hollow as a ghost, 
As dim and meagre as an ague's fit, 



KING JOHN. 145 

And so he '11 die, and, rising so again, 
When I shall meet him in the court of he'aven 
I shall not know him. Therefore never, never 
Must I behold my pretty Arthur more. 

Pand. You hold too heinous a respect of grief. 

Const. He talks to me, that never had a son. '* 

K. Phi. You are as fond of grief, as of your child. 

Const. Grief fills the room up of my absent child. 
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me, 
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words. 
Remembers me of all his gracious parts, 
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form. 
Then, have I reason to be fond of grief. 
Fare you well ! Had you such a loss, as I, 
I could give better comfort, than you do." 

Here we have the transmuting virtue there 
is in poetry that it can make suffering spiritu 
ally attractive, draw a beatitude out of intense 
misery. Carrying dormant in his broad, deep 
manhood the joys and sorrows his fellow-men 
are liable to, when Shakespeare depicted a 
Lear or a Constance a poetic light shone upon 
his fellow-feeling and wakened it to such rhyth- 
mic moans that the deepest pangs of the heart 
become transfigured into beauty, mankind 
eagerly welcoming them to its breast, and ap- 
propriating them in their exquisiteness as a 
purifying cordial. In such passages Shake- 
speare's doing may be likened to that of some 

radiant Titan who, grasping the trunk of an 
10 



146 SHAKESPEARE. 

oak, through a latent might in his nervous arm 
should by shaking it make it, instead of acorns, 
drop glittering diamonds, to the wonder, de- 
light, and enrichment of the beholders. 

This great play abounds in scenes of tender 
or terrible pathos. What a picture of the tar- 
tarean interior of an assassin's brain, bemas- 
tered by thoughts too damnable for utterance, 
when King John puts Arthur into the keeping 
of Hubert ! 

" I had a thing to say, — But let it go : 
The sun is in the heaven, and the proud day, 
Attended with the pleasures of the world, 
Is all too wanton, and too full of gawds, 
To give me audience. — If the midnight bell 
Did, with his iron tongue and brazen mouth 
Sound one unto the drowsy race of night, 
If this same were a church-yard where we stand, 
And thou possessed with a thousand wrongs ; 
Or if that surly spirit, melancholy. 
Had bak'd thy blood, and made it heavy, thick, 
(Which, else, runs tickling up and down the veins, 
Making that idiot, laughter, keep men's eyes, 
And strain their cheeks to idle merriment, 
A passion hateful to my purposes ;) 
Or if that thou could' st see me without eyes, 
Hear me without thine ears, and m^ke reply 
Without a tongue, using conceit alone, 
Without eyes, ears, and harmful sound of words : 
Then, in despite of brooded watchful day, 
I would into thy bosom pour my thoughts. 



KING JOHN. 147 

This scene, like all his greatest scenes, is 
pure Shakesperean invention. Arthur's end 
is shrouded in mystery, which only the con- 
science of John can penetrate. History does 
not know how his death was brought about. 
It knows that John took him prisoner ; and 
that was the last heard of him. 

With such a picture before us as that of 
Constance, all glistening with poetic tears, we 
pause and say, " here the poet must have 
reached the maximum of excellence," when, 
only a few pages further, listening, in exquisite 
awe, to the talk of John to Hubert, we find 
ourselves reveling with delight in the inmost 
hideousness of the blackest of murderers. And 
still a few pages further, this Proteus — far 
more mobile and mutable than the Greek sea- 
god — transforms himself out of the ghastly, 
royal assassin, not into Prince Arthur, — for 
no Prince ever spoke such words as does this 
" pretty child " of Shakespeare when pleading 
with Hubert for his eyes, — but into one of 
the most heavenly creations of Art, and yet so 
natural as to give no hint of Art, so simple 
and soulful that it stands for every bright- 
minded, innocent boy that ever was or ever 
will be, and yet, so poetical that, while within 



148 SHAKESPEARE. 

the bounds of nature, it transcends by its 
truthful perfection the reality of any reported 
boyhood. 

Nevertheless the chief power of the play is 
Faulconbridge. Him Shakespeare makes the 
plenipotentiary of England, to represent and 
act out English backbone, courage, common 
sense, patriotism. 'Tis he whom, in the battle 
with the invading French, Salisbury describes : 

" That misbegotten devil Faulconbridge, 
In spite of spite, alone upholds the day." 

In the scene over the dead body of Arthur, 
when the nobles, in their holy rage, draw their 
swords and would slay Hubert on the instant, 
Faulconbridge interposes : 

" Pern. Cut him to pieces ! 

Bast. Keep the peace, I say ! 

Sal. Stand by, or I shall gall you, Faulconbridge. 

Bast. Thou wert better gall the devil, Salisbury. 
If thou but frown on me, or stir thy foot, 
Or teach thy hasty spleen to do me shame, 
I '11 strike thee dead. Put up thy sword betime ! 
Or I '11 so maul you and your toasting-iron. 
That you shall think the devil is come from hell." 

This is one side of his strength ; here is an- 
other. When the angry lords are gone Faul- 
conbridge thus addresses Hubert : 



KING JOHN. 149 

^^ Bast. .... Knew you of this fair work 1 
Beyond the infinite and boundless reach 
Of mercy, if thou didst this deed of death, 
Art thou damn'd, Hubert. 

Hub. Do but hear me, sir ! 

Bast. Ha ! I'll tell thee what : 
Thou art damn'd as black — nay, nothing is so black ; 
Thou art more deep damn'd, than prince Lucifer. 
There is not yet so ugly a fiend of hell 
As thou shalt be, if thou didst kill this child. 

Httb. Upon my soul, — 

Bast. If thou didst but consent 
' To this most cruel act, do but despair ! 
And, if thou want'st a cord, the smallest thread, 
That ever spider twisted from her womb. 
Will serve to strangle thee ; a rush will be 
A beam to hang thee on ; or would'st thou drown thyself, 
Put but a little water in a spoon, ' 

And it shall be as all the ocean, 
Enough to stifle such a villain up. — 
I do suspect thee very grievously. 

Hub. If I in act, consent, or sin of thought, 
Be guilty of the stealing that sweet breath. 
Which was embounded in this beauteous clay, 
Let hell want pains enough to torture me ! 
I left him well. 

Bast, Go, bear him in thine arms ! " 

And then he exclaims, in words that every 
day of every year carry the thoughts and feel- 
ings of thousands of strugglers when startled 
and confounded by the crimes and moral con- 
fusions that glare suddenly upon them : 



150 SHAKESPEARE, 

" I am amazed, methinks ; and lose my way 
Among the thorns and dangers of this world." 

Nowhere does Shakespeare exhibit with 
more distinctness his intellectual lucidity and 
his artistic mastership than in foreshortening 
history. He condenses a decade or a reign 
into five acts, with such picturesque perception 
and historic grasp that we get the spirit of a 
period compactly bound, but faithfully pre- 
served, in a poetic condensation. 

Looking from a height over a mountainous 
region the eye seizes the peaks ; the lower 
hills out of which they rise are scarcely seen. 
So in a genuine historical drama only the alti- 
tudes of history are noted. by one looking from 
the sunny summit of poetry, and these, with 
the vigorous personages who make the alti- 
tudes, give the reader the most vivid view of a 
marked period and the actors in it. A va- 
riously and brilliantly and deeply gifted man, 
Shakespeare, in the majestic strength of his 
large manhood, stood above history. History, 
ov>ring its interest and significance to the un- 
folded faculties of man, Shakespeare, through 
his fellow-feeling with all humanity, and thence 
his sure insight into it, dominated history, and 
as poet-thinker reproduced its very spirit, as 
he does in King John. 



KING JOHN. 151 

The nobles having returned to their alle- 
giance, and the invading French army having 
been routed, from the mouth of Faulconbridge 
are made to issue those great concluding words 
that have ever since been resounding in the 
ear of England : 

" This England never did, (nor never shall,) 
Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror, 
But when it first did help to wound itself. 
Now these her princes are come home again, 
Come the three corners of the world in arms, 
And we shall shock them. Nought shall make us rue. 
If England to itself do rest but true." 



IV. 

^HAMLET. 

Truth to the moral law is the life of poetic 
drama. Tragedy, especially, cannot draw the 
long breaths needed for the full sweep of its 
function unless it have above it, alive with 
sanitary currents, a deep, clear, spiritual at- 
mosphere. Only when behind the wrecks of 
perverted passion is visible the background of 
moral allegiance and security, can the gloom 
be illuminated by the transfiguring bow thrown 
by the sun of poetry. The degree of fullness 
in "moral regency being the measure of human 
well-being, poetic tragedy — the richest fruit 
of man's literary productiveness — can only 
prosper through acknowledgement of the ab- 
soluteness of this regency. 
• To invent and organize a tragic drama, to 
group a number of figures so that each shall 
move to the spring of its own individuality, 
and each and all, by their movements and col- 
lisions, shall tend to a given catastrophe, ob- 



■HAMLET. 153 

serving throughout due moral and aesthetic 
proportions, animating each scene with lively 
progressive dialogue and effective action, 
breathing into all the parts the breath of 
poetic health, so that the whole may be a thing 
of life and beauty, — to do this, is to accom- 
plish a work of finest human achievement. 

The value of a dramatic work depends pri- 
marily upon the mental calibre of its chief per- 
sonages ; that is, upon their warmth and 
strength of feeling and their intellectual com- 
petency. These present the substance that is 
to be vivified by poetic glorification, and these 
depend, of course, entirely upon the poet : his 
personality is the source of all. And only a 
poet can fully reproduce a human being. Co- 
riolanus and Anthony, Richard 11. and Henry 
v., were never, since their decease, vividly 
present to men until they were resuscitated 
by Shakespeare. Of King Duncan's murderer 
you can get an outside view in Hollingshed ; 
but if you would be acquainted with the very 
being of the man, you must go to Shakespeare. 
His Macbeth stands there forever a distinct, 
terrible, towering colossus, supplanting legend, 
superseding history. 

* Like Macbeth and Lear, Hamlet was begot- 



154 SHAKESPEARE. 

ten on national legend. Thus, possessing, 
like them, a dim, historic background, wherein 
popular belief is tenaciously rooted, it has 
under it a basis of rudimentary actuality ; at 
the same time there is no circle of historic cer- 
titude to control the poet's invention. Thence 
human possibility — in all high poetry a sub- 
lime element — opens to these masterpieces 
its widest reaches for the play of creative lord- 
ship. 

With all his universality of sympathy, and 
what might be called his impartial poetic bourl- 
teousness, Shakespeare had his favorites, — fav- 
orites in this sense, that some tasked his crea- 
tive energy with a more vivid, and therefore 
more joyful, presence than others. Lear could 
not but give him hours of more rapturous work 
than Gloster. The drawing from the secret 
recesses of his nature the fearful Macbeth gave 
him a deeper joy than to portray the blame- 
less Banquo. In the multitude of his viva- 
cious, captivating, infinitely di-versified dra- 
matic progeny, more than by any other, we 
are captivated and stimulated by Hamlet, be- 
cause Hamlet drew more deeply from his 
poetic maker's best resources, from his warm- 
est and finest sensibilities, from* his highest, 
most elastic intellectual forces. 



HAMLET. 155 

The plot of Haiflety — being founded on 
fratricide and adultery, tending for its culmina- 
tion to the slaying of a king, the poisoning of 
a queen, the treacherous killing of a prince ; 
having for its incidents the homicide of the 
father of two leading personages, the lacerat- 
ing rupture of love-vows, the lunacy and death 
of the maiden-lover ; and thus involving out- 
rage of the primary affections of humanity, the 
warm, elementary feelings which are the neces- 
sary bonds of the family and society, — this 
plot harbors within its bosom more of the por- 
tentous wreckful elements of tragedy than any 
other of Shakespeare's great dramas. Here, 
then, was the poet's richest opportunity. The 
manifold antagonistic conjunctions, the pas- 
sionate collisions, calling on him for more than 
usually diversified utterance, poetical as well 
as pungent, stirred the deeps of his being and 
drew delightfully upon his radiant store of 
ideals. 

In so far as logic can work with rather 
vague materials, external evidence confirms 
the internal to show that Shakespeare wrote 
Hamlet between his thirty-third and thirty- 
ninth years ; that is, when he had just entered 
upon the full enjoyment of his vast mental es- 



1 5 6 SHAKESPEARE. 

tate, and when all his faculties, ripened by 
strenuous exercise and various production, 
were at their flood, boiling, bursting with life, 
exuberant with power, craving larger delivery. 
Upon this flood, as his cradle, was Hamlet 
rocked. Shakespeare wanted a drama, and 
especially a controlling personage in it, to em^ 
body in them, more plenteoiisly than he had 
yet done, his brimming wealth ; and finding 
in Belleforest's Historie of Hamblet (borrowed 
from Saxo Grammaticus) a germ, a rude skele- 
ton, he took it, and out of a crude, semi-bar- 
barous tale, out of an aesthetic nothing, he 
wrought into grand, graceful porportions a 
poetic world. He wanted a character through 
whom he could give issue to that lofty inquisi- 
tiveness into man's destiny, that active medi- 
tativeness on the mystery and end of being, 
which are the growth of a mind at once large- 
thoughted and palpitating with sensibility, and 
which on the wonderfully endowed poet were 
just then pressing with the fervor of young 
manhood, now fully launched on infinite seas 
of thought. 

For the seething plot which his poetically 
imaginative invention had wrought out of a 
raw, bloody legend he needed, as a more im- 



HAMLET. 157 

mediate representative of himself a protago- 
nist in whom should be active a high reason, 
ever seeking causes, binding together remotest 
motions, and with this reason sympathies that 
should shed their reveahng light upon all forms 
of being. On this broad, profound plan he 
organized his greatest drama. The whole 
multitude of personages in his many dramas 
are, in greater or less degree, exponents of 
Shakespeare himself, — and this is their deep- 
est virtue ; but now he wanted a mouthpiece 
of his searching meditation and his sententious 
wisdom, and so he seized upon the Hamlet of 
Danish legend, transformed and transfigured 
him, and made him, counter to probabilities, 
thirty years of age. Counter to probabilities, 
for the university student-age rarely extends 
beyond twenty-five ; and it was also far less 
probable that the usurpation of a throne by an 
uncle would succeed against a man with the 
ripened feelings and the experience of thirty 
years in his brain than against a youth who 
had just reached manhood. In 'the original 
story Prince Hamlet, at the time of his uncle's 
usurpation, is a minor. But these external 
proprieties Shakespeare readily sacrificed to 
the internal propriety of not put-ting into the 



158 SHAKESPEARE. 

mind and mouth of a youth of twenty the pro- 
found philosophical questionings, the large 
knowledge, and pithy sayings of a matured 

man. Qamlet, aged thirty,_.ia,jyxe^.chidLag^aL^. 
of the drama ; but behind Hamlet is one more 
powerful than he. Let us look into the play 
to learn who this is. 

The first scene opens thus : Francisco, sen- 
tinel on the platform before the royal castle of 
Elsinore, anxiously challenges a comer, who 
turns out to be Bernardo, a fellow-soldier, who 
to relieve Francisco is come punctually upon 
his hour, which is midnight. The relieved sen- 
tinel is most thankful, for it is "■ bitter cold " 
and he is " sick at heart." As he is taking 
leave arrive Marcellus and Horatio. No 
sooner has Bernardo welcomed them than 
Marcellus asks eagerly : " What, has this thing 
appeared again to-night .-* " These few simple 
words are the hinge upon which turns the great- 
est tragedy, the highest poem, of literature. 

The commentators make no account of the 
Ghost. They treat him pretty much as the 
editors of the play treat him who place him 
towards the end of the Dramatis PersoncE, not 
even clothed, like the other personages, in 
capital letters. In the Rugby edition (1873), 



HAMLET. 159 

edited by the Rev. C. E. Moberly, the Ghost 
is put after "■ Messengers and other attend- 
ants," as though he were the most insignifi- 
cant of the supernumeraries. The editor 
would apparently like to get rid of him alto- 
gether ! 

Coleridge, in his celebrated essay on Ham- 
let, gives two or three pages to the Ghost, but 
only for the purpose of showing the admirable 
judgment of Shakespeare in preparing for and 
managing the introduction of the Ghost at his 
several entrances ; and he adds : '* Hume him- 
self could not but have had faith in this ghost 
dramatically, let his antighostism have been 
as strong as Sampson against other ghosts less 
powerfully raised!' . I have italicized the last 
words to show that the verisimilitude and ef- 
fectiveness of the Ghost are solely due, in the 
opinion of Coleridge, to the skill with which 
he is handled by the poet. On the third ap- 
pearance of the Ghost, in Hamlet's presence, 
Coleridge speaks of its ''fearful subjectivity." 
By this he can only mean that the Ghost was 
a brain-vision, caused by the intensely excited 
feelings of Hamlet and his companions. On 
being once asked if he believed in ghosts, Col- 
eridge answered; " No, I have seen too many 



\ 



l6o SHAKESPEARE. 

of them." He looked upon them as in all 
cases not objective, but subjective, that is, 
images on the brain of the beholder, mistaken 
by him for outward objects. In the essay, to 
exemplify his view of. Hamlet as one who is 
overmeditative and thought-oppressed, he says : 
" Hamlet's thoughts and the images of his 
fancy are far more vivid than his actual per- 
ceptions, and his very perceptions, instantly 
passing through the medium of his contem- 
plations, acquire, as they pass, a form and a 
color not naturally their own." Now, by his 
treatment of the Ghost he verifies a remark 
about himself in his reported Table-talk : " I 
have a smack of Hamlet myself, if I may say 
so ; " that is, of Hamlet as he interprets him 
above ; for he permits his critical perceptions 
to be so smothered in his meditations as not 
to allow him to become aware that Shake- 
speare has with marked design and care 
guarded the Ghost of Hamlet's father against 
the damaging imputation of subjectivity. To 
shield him from the possibility of such im- 
peachment, he brings ''this dreaded sight" 
twice, on two different nights, before the sen- 
tinels Marcellus and Bernardo. When Mar- 
cellus relates to Horatio what they have seen, 



HAMLET. l6l 

the calm, clear-headed Horatio assured him 
that it was a subjective ghost, that is, an im- 
age on their brains. Had there been but one 
brain the explanation of Horatio would have 
been more plausible. And so Marcellus has 

. . . . " Entreated him along 
With us to watch the minutes of this night. 
That if again this apparition come, 
He may approve our eyes and speak to it. 
Horatio. Tush, tush 't will not appear." 

In a few moments it does appear, and Hora- 
tio is harrowed with fear and wonder. The 
Ghost stalks away, but reappears in the midst 
of their talk. Here are three men who have 
seen the Ghost, all three of them twice, and 
two of them four times. But for his strong 
desire thus to secure his great Ghost against 
the dishonoring suspicion of being taken for a 
brain-born phantom, Shakespeare would have 
had him appear to Hamlet alone. There was 
no other motive for his appearance, and re- 
peated appearance, to the sentinels. 

And now let us make acquaintance with 
Hamlet before he has seen the Ghost, or has 
heard of him. 

When, at the opening of the second scene of 
the play, Hamlet first comes before us, in the 
II 



1 62 SHAKESPEARE. 

suite of the King and Queen, he is suffering 
from two stunning, moral blows. The brother 
of his father had, a few weeks before, by foul 
arts, usurped the throne which by expectation 
and legitimate right was Hamlet's ; and his 
mother, within less than two months after his 
father's sudden death, had made an incestuous 
marriage with the usurper. The first words 
uttered by Hamlet are a significant aside. 
The King, — after despatch of some public 
business and the granting of Laertes' petition 
to return to France, — with hypocritical de- 
meanor, in words which to the deeply wronged 
and wounded Prince must have seemed almost 
mockery, addresses Hamlet: 

" But now, my cousin Hamlet and my son, — 
Ham. [Aside] A little more than kin, and less than kind. 
King. How is it that the clouds still hang on you ? 
Ham. Not so, my lord : I am too much i' the sun." 

Kind, in the second line, is the German word 
for child, anji was, doubtless, intelligible in that 
sense in England in Shakespeare's day. Being 
** too much i' the sun " means, to be turned out 
of doors, Hamlet bitterly veiling what he felt 
in a proverb. 

Mortified, subdued by his mother's unholy 
marriage, humiliated by his own abased posi- 



HAMLET. 163 

tion, Hamlet, not a self-asserter or self-seeker, 
is just in that depressed, flaccid state to yield 
to his mother's request that he go not back to 
Wittenberg. A few moments after this com- 
pliance, being alone, he breaks forth into the 
first great soliloquy. In this frank communion 
with himself is suddenly brought to view the 
depth as well as tenderness of his nature : 

" Ham. O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt, 
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew ! 
Or, that the Everlasting had not fix'd 
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter ! O God ! O God ! 
How weary, stale, fiat, and unprofitable, 
Seem to me all the uses of this world ! 
Fye on't ! O fye ! 'tis an unweeded garden, 
That grows to seed ; things rank, and gross in nature, 
Possess it merely. That it should come to this ! 
But two months dead ! — nay, not so much, not two : 
So excellent a king ; that was, to this, 
Hyperion to a satyr : so loving to my mother 
That he might not beteem the winds of heaven 
Visit her face too roughly." 

To write what Shakespeare wrote, — aye, 
to write only this one play, — the writer's 
brain must be a glowing globe whose healthy 
pulses shoot forth beams that inflame what- 
ever they fall on with a new warmth and a 
new light, darting forth at the same time, un- 
der the resistless impulse of feeling, intellectual 



164 SHAKESPEARE. 

threads to bind to^ itself with its thought the 
highest as well as the subtlest relations among 
created things. A ~ being thus sensitive and 
sympathetic and thoughtful is especially liable 
to hours of reaction from the raptures of its 
creative liveliness, — hours when the blank 
contrast between the world its own flaraes have 
lighted up and the fiat, brutish, shallow doings 
around it wring from it a cry of despair. The 
soul is then disgusted with its temporary clay 
tenement, and would flee away to its eternal 
home. Shakespeare was strong too in animal 
passion ; had he not been, we should have had 
no Shakespeare's dramas. This passion will 
not always keep in its place, but will be push- 
ing the legitimate, spiritual rulers from their 
throne, or intoxicating them with sensuous in- 
cense. Hence lapses and errors and crimes. 
Moreover, to a certain kind of lapse the poeti- 
cally imaginative is more exposed than his 
prosaic fellow. What conflicts and remorses 
and depressions dear Shakespeare may have 
been subject to in London, away from wife 
and family, we may conjecture from the 
glimpses vouchsafed us. And here let us 
have no whining, biographical impertinence, 
and, least of all, no self-righteousness : we will 



HAMLET. 165 

keep that for contemporary neighbors. Wishes 
that would modify, even by a tittle, this tran- 
scendent fellow-man are sacrilegious. God 
gave him the richest, deepest mind that vig- 
orous England has bred, and thus made him a 
light and a benefaction to the race. He is so 
great and wide and perennial a benefactor be- - 
cause, w^hatever may have been his aberrations 
and self-indulgences, they touched not his core. 
His poetic imagination, braced and vivified by 
the passionate realism of his life, took from 
it nor stain nor taint ; and thence, the breaths 
that blow from the vast domains of his beau- 
tiful creation bring with them moral health 
as well as aesthetic cheer and intellectual 
strength. 

Shakespeare's poetic faculty, working upon 
his wealth of sensibilities and perceptions, 
wrought easily into shape an lago or a Corde- 
lia, a Miranda or a Cloten, but, as before inti- 
mated, there is reason to believe that at the 
epoch in his personal history when the tragedy 
of Hamlet was produced he found a high sat- 
isfaction and a gain in putting more of his 
every-day personality into the mouth of its 
protagonist. And so, when Hamlet longs for 
death, and is withheld from suicide by religion. 



1 66 SHAKESPEARE. 

we may have had a glance at a shadow which 
at times darkened the being of Shakespeare 
himself. At a younger age Goethe was familiar 
with such thoughts. 

Of this expressive, touching first soliloquy 
the most significant line is the last : 

'* But break my heart ; for I must hold my tongue." 

His heart was ready to break from filial shame. 
As for his own wrong, for that he must bide 
his time. If his usurping uncle (for as yet 
Hamlet has no thought that he is a fratricidal 
seducer) should estrange the people by his 
wicked ways, or should stumble and fall, or 
end himself through plethora and drink, the 
rightful heir is ready to assume his just place. 
To that place he must be lifted, not pushed 
into it from behind, from self-seeking, from 
ambition, from lust of rule. Hamlet is not a 
politician, that he should set to work by largess 
and intrigue and the demagogue's arts — so 
prosperously plied by his uncle — to build a 
party that should work for him. He is one 
who by fair means would gain an honest end, 
not one who could work for any end by foul 
means. In Hamlet, Shakespeare, it seems to 
me, designed to draw a man of deep inward- 
ness, not on that account incapable of outward 



HAMLET. 167 

acts, energetic and VN^ise. Few men, and still 
fewer public men, possess this deep inward- 
ness ; hence Oxenstierna's complaint of the 
little wisdom with which the world is gov- 
erned, Louis Napoleon is a full exemplifica- 
tion of a man of shallow outwardness instead 
of deep inwardness. A man whose sole thought 
is self is by necessity shallow. Louis Napo- 
leon, thus singly possessed, spurred by the 
most worldly ambition, lured by the Jack-o- 
lantern flicker of luxurious fruition, paused 
not at foul means to gain a foul end, and, hav- 
ing reigned without -conscience, fell inglori- 
ously, dragging down into the mire of humilia- 
tion — to expiate their false trust in him and 
his name — a great, gallant, sensitive people, 
while himself, hurled from his factitious throne, 
died in a deserved exile, leaving a reputation 
from which has already faded the false lustre 
of an unworthy Imperialism, and leaving a 
name that will forever stink in the nostrils of 
history. Hamlet was the opposite of this. 

Not more absolute and peremptory over the 
course of planets is gravitation than in the 
conduct of life, private or public, is the moral 
law. Its judgments execute themselves, often 
but partially in this earthly portion of our life ; 



1 68 SHAKESPEARE. 

the intertwisted threads of our activity here 
get completely straightened, out only by wind- 
ing themselves upon the long hereafter. But 
enough is seen and felt of the paramount sway 
of this law to make us know its divine health- 
fulness as well as its absoluteness. And in 
no literary product are its ascendancy and its 
beauty more distinctly and impressively ex- 
hibited than in the pages of Shakespeare. 
Hamlet was a darling pupil of this supreme 
power : he was a man of scruples. 

In this state of refined sorrow, of virtuous 
passiveness, when with a" heavy sigh of present 
resignation he .has just exclaimed, — 

" But break my heart ; for I must hold my tongue ; " 

enter to him Horatio, Marcellus, and Bernardo, 
come to tell him of the sight they have seen 
on the castle platform at midnight. 

A cardinal literary virtue of Shakespeare is, 
that he always rises to the poetic level, of the 
scene before him ; and the claim of Hamlet to 
superiority over any and all of its fellow-dra- 
mas springs from this, that there are in this 
play more and more diversified, scenes that 
task to their utmost the best faculties of the 
poet In the present scene, what a dialogue 
follows the momentous announcement ot Ho- 



HAMLET. 169 

ratio to Hamlet that he saw Hamlet's father 
yesternight ! Awe, wonder, filial devotion, in- 
tense curiosity, so stretch of a sudden the 
cords of Hamlet's intellect that they seem as 
they would snap with the tension. One after 
the other his gasping interpellations leap out 
with such hungry impatience as they could not 
brook the delay even of moments. When, after 
having engaged to meet them on the castle- 
platform between eleven and twelve, he dis- 
misses them, he exclaims : 

■ " My father's spirit in arms ! all is not well ; 
I doubt some foul play." 

Before the coming of the night-watch with 
their great tidings Hamlet was in such a state 
of apathy, of supineness, that, had not the start- 
ling report from the platform been brought to 
him, we should have had to follow him back to 
Wittenberg, whither the king — maugre his 
hypocritical protest — would have been glad tcT 
have him go ; and then there would have been 
no play of Hamlet. That we have this play 
— the choice jewel in the poetic diadem of our 
language, — we must be forever thankful to the 
Ghost. For now,^ instead of being a prey to 
apathy. Prince Hamlet's breast heaves with tu- 
mult ; his best faculties are aroused and aHght. 



I/O SHAKESPEARE. 

Eager with ominous expectation, every minute 
that divides him from midnight seems an hour. 

" If it assume my noble father's person, 
I '11 speak to it, though hell itself should gape 
And bid me hold my peace." 

At last the lagging hours are gone ; in the 
" nipping and eager air " Hamlet stands on the 
platform beside Horatio and Marcellus. 

^^ Horatio. Look, my lord, it comes ! " 

Aye, it comes, for the fifth time, and in the 
form of the Majesty of buried Denmark. 

" Angels and ministers of Grace defend us ! " 

The first speech of Hamlet seems long for an 
awe-struck man to address to a palpable por- 
tentous visitant from the other world. But 
Art hath its privileges, privileges needful for 
its suitable manifestation. 

When at the end of Hamlet's speech the 
•Ghost beckons him, and his companions would 
dissuade him from going with it, Hamlet's sub- 
lime exclamation, — 

" Why what should be the fear 1 
I do not set my life at a pin's fee ; 
And for my soul, what can it do to that, 
Being a thing immortal as itself," 

is in contradiction to these lines in the speech, 



HAMLET. 171 

" Why thy canonized bones, hearsed m death, 
Have burst their cerements ; why the sepulcre, 
Wherein we saw thee quietly inurned, 
Hath oped his ponderous and marble jaws, 
To cast thee up again." 

By the unearthly grandeur of the moment 
roused to liveliest self-assertion, Hamlet af- 
firms his essential equality with the Ghost, 
and in so doing recognizes in the apparition a 
spirit. In the passage just quoted from the 
speech to the Ghost he accepts the common 
error of the bodys resurrection, an error which 
to the thought of resurrection gives a material 
grossness, a repulsive ghastliness. The bones 
are in the sepulchre ; the sepulchre has not 
opened its marble jaws to cast them up again. 
Hamlet sees before him what St. Paul names 
the spiritual body. When, in his last hour, 
the disciples of Socrates would comfort him 
with the assurance that they would see to his 
being fittingly buried, this greatest of the great 
Greeks, who had seized intuitively the deep 
truth about soul and body, answered them 
cheerfully ; "You will have to catch me first." 

The me Socrates knew was not the corporeal 
body. In Shakespeare's day the popular be- 
lief was that the identical body rises again. 
This is still the popular, derived from the the- 



1^2 SHAKESPEARE, 

ological, belief. The stoutest in self-substan- 
tiality cannot entirely withstand the pressure 
of general opinion. Socrates himself, in his 
last moments, requested his disciples to sacri- 
fice on his behalf a cock which he owed to 
^sculapius. 

By the terrible disclosure, of the Ghost the 
intellect of Hamlet is quickened to keenest 
vivacity. In the few moments that elapsed 
between the departure of the Ghost and the 
reentrance of Horatio and Marcellus he has 
taken a notable resolution, which is, for his 
protection, to affect madness. This Shake- 
speare got from the legend as rendered by 
Belleforest. The perilous tragic revelation of 
the Ghost, with its overwhelming effect on 
himself and his future conduct, impels Hamlet 
to another hard resolution, namely, to break 
with Ophelia, 

On a man such as Shakespeare has depicted 
Hamlet — one in whom, among the qualities 
that make up his remarkable individuality, are 
affectionateness, sincerity, earnestness — the 
passion of love would be likely to fasten with a 
strong, clinging hold. Under pressure of the 
revealment of his uncle's heinous guilt, — a 
guilt so monstrous and damnable that the spirit 



HAMLET. 173 

of its victim has come from his transearthly 
home to lay it bare, with piteous ghostly voice 
putting upon his son a solemn commandment 
of revenge, — under this pressure, feeling that 
from the table of his memory he must ''wipe 
all trivial fond records," his first thought is of 
Ophelia, for, in the face of this new, awful re- 
sponsibility, even his love becomes a triviality. 
How shall he break with her ? If to him this 
is a heavy 'blow, what will it not be to her ? 
And Hamlet is tender-hearted, and deeply 
loves Ophelia. Yet, the breach must be. A 
fearful deed, to be done by his hand, has taken 
tyrannous possession of him, and it is his duty, 
to her as to himself, that the dear tie between 
them be rent. To himself as well as to her 
his mask of madness shall weaken the force 
of the blow. This is to be the first trial of his 
feigned lunacy. The trial completely succeeds. 
Ophelia comes running in to her father ex- 
claiming, — 

** O, my lord, my lord, I have been so affrighted ! " 

In the midst of her description of the un- 
usual bearing and appearance of Hamlet, the 
profound, infallible Polonius interrupts her : 

" Mad for thy love ? " — . 
" I do not know, my lord ; But truly I do fear it." 



174 SHAKESPEARE. 

When Hamlet, Ic^dng hold of Ophelia's 
wrist, '' raised a sigh so piteous and profound 
that it did seem to shatter all his bulk and 
end his being," the sigh was a real sigh, telling 
of real agony; but the mask of madness en- 
abled him to heave it in Ophelia's presence. 
Of this extraordinary scene, — not presented 
visibly but only in the relation of Ophelia, — 
the most marked feature is the last : 

" That done, he lets me go ; 
And, with his head over his shoulder turned, 
He seemed to find his way without his eyes, 
For out o' doors he went without their help. 
And, to the last, bended their light on- me." 

Hamlet's mind is now strung to its utmost. 
Instead of the languor of his first appearance, 
with his sad submissiveness to the King and 
his mother, his faculties are now alert, eager, 
aggressive. His scorn of Polonius he delights 
in giving vent to in ridicule and bitter railing ; 
his wrathful hatred of the King breaks out in 
sarcasm or innuendo, to which feigned lunacy 
empowers him to give a keener edge. 

The first interview with Rosencrantz and 
Guildenstern is a lively exhibition of this 
mental alertness. His talk is thousrhtful and 
imaginative. • He quickly detects that they 



HAMLET. 175 

have been sent for by the King and Queen, to 
pluck out the heart of his mystery. His touch- 
ing appeal to them they cannot withstand : '* Let 
me conjure you, by the rights of our fellow- 
ship, by the consonancy of our youth, by the 
obligations of our ever-preserved love, and by 
what more dear a better proposer could charge 
you withal, be even and direct with me, whether 
you were sent for, or no ?" This disconcerts 
them, and they confess that they were sent 
for. Then follows that passage which for 
grandeur and beauty and truth of thought, for 
marvelous transparence and charm of style, 
one feels tempted to place at the very top of 
the interminable array of splendent sentences 
that flow with tropic affluence from Shake- 
speare's pen : " I have of late — but wherefore 
I know not — lost all my mirth, forgone all 
custom of exercises ; and indeed it goes so 
heavily with my disposition, that this goodly 
frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile prom- 
ontory, this most excellent canopy, the air, 
look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, 
this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, 
why, it appears no other thing to me than 
a foul and pestilent congregation of 'vapors. 
What a piece of work is man ! how noble in 



176 SHAKESPEARE. 

reason ! how infinite in faculty ! in form and 
moving how express and admirable ! in action 
how like an angel ! in apprehension how like 
a god ! the beauty of the world ! the paragon 
of animals ! " 

Observe that this passage is prose in form. 
It is not measured off into iambic lines of ten 
syllables, nevertheless, it is melodiously rhyth- 
mical, and it is poetical, for it had its birth in 
a glow of creative sensibility, and it flows out 
with a golden cadence. The dialogue between 
Hamlet and his two friends is appropriately in 
prose. When to Hamlet, depicting to them his 
mental condition, it occurs that he can best do 
it by a blaze of poetic imaginativeness, which 
by contrast will give a vivid notion of the dark- 
ness of his individual mental mood, Shake- 
speare — delighted, as he always is, with an 
opportunity for the blooming of the ideal — 
gives him full swing. A patch of blank verse, 
thrust into a prose dialogue, would have been 
a blotch instead of a beauty, and so Shake- 
speare, knowing the predominancy of sub- 
stance over form, of soul over body, made 
poetic feeling to beam through a passage of 
prose without thereby losing any of its^ lustre 
or effect. This passage is precious, too, as 



HAMLET. 



177 



laying open to us Shakespeare's creed on man 
and nature : 

" What a piece of work is man ! " 

A tempting field for brilliant maneuvering of 
intellectual forces is the interview with the 
players. Here let it be remarked, that to give 
fresh Hvely play to the wider and deeper facul- 
ties of the mind is the highest achievement of 
tragedy; and as the passionate conjunctions 
and collisions — the best of this highest — are 
necessarily limited in space and number, to fill 
the scenes with sparkling intellectual display, 
enkindled by feeling, lifts a tragedy to the 
nobler plane of Art. Hamlet, with his large, 
lively gifts, enjoyed this nobler plane. Like 
his maker, Shakespeare, he was prone to re- 
flection and generalization. He went readily 
on excursions of psychological discovery. Nev- 
ertheless, when, at the conclusion of the very 
long scene, he has dismissed the players, then 
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, his first words 
come out on a long-drawn breath of relief: 
"Now I am alone." To a man of Hamlet's 
thoughtfulness and inwardness, self-communion 
is his chief need and enjoyment. He enjoys 
and profits by communion with other men, but 
his favorite company is his own thoughts. 



12 



178 SHAKESPEARE. 

The self-communion which follows the ex- 
clamation, *' I am alone," must not be taken 
too literally. A richly endowed idealist, Ham- 
let likes to give the reins to his poetic imagi- 
nation, and this bears him, like an eagle before 
the wind, swiftly away over abysses of feeling, 
Qver mountain-heights of human possibility, as 
in a waking dream ; and when he becomes 
aware of this alteration, and lets himself sud- 
denly down from it, his present actuality seems 
to him unworthy and base. Moreover, — and 
is not this the key to Hamlet's conduct.? — 
alongside of the loathing for his uncle, and the 
conviction that it is almost a sin to let him 
live, there is a shrinking back from the thought 
of deliberately slaying him with his own hand, 
a shrinking back with a shudder as searching 
as that against self -slaughter. Hamlet is by 
nature gentle-mirided, with deep moral sensibil- 
ity. Under the terrible spell of his father's 
spirit he promised to be his active representa- 
tive, the executor of his vengeance. But he 
could not be what he promised to be. Happily 
there are many men who cannot do deliberate 
deadly execution even upon a vile fratricide. 
The Ghost wrought powerfully upon Hamlet's 
feelings, but could not change his nature, 



HAMLET. 179 

could not make bis ** thoughts be bloody." 
The ideal exaltations of a man like Hamlet 
tend not at all to quicken action counter to his 
natural bent ; but they do tend to enrich his 
mind and to qualify him for future efficiency, 
and for present good deeds. 

In the soliloquy at the close of Act II., 
Hamlet deals in the wildest self-reproaches for 
not executing vengeance on the 

" Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain ! " 

but he cannot lash himself up to the killing 
point. More than half conscious that he has it 
not in him to fulfill the promise to his father's 
spirit, in the soliloquy at the beginning of 
Act III. there is a reaction against the de- 
sire to live, which was so lively just after the 
interview with the Ghost. Again, — as before 
the interview, — he entertains the thought of 
escaping by suicide from 2 ':ask he feels to be 
too weighty for him. A^in he throws the 
immense line of his thought into the ocean of 
infinitude; but he finds he is not on sound- 
ings, even with so long a line as he can throw. 
In Shakespeare's greatest passages, — and 
he has hundreds of greatest passages,* — the 
literary lustre is so bright, that for the moment 
we deem the one we are reading his master- 



l8o SHAKESPEARE. 

piece. Literary lustre implies much. Only 
literary diamonds are susceptible of the highest 
lustre : you can smooth and polish pudding- 
stone, but polish as much as you will you will 
get no sparkle from it ; sparkles come from 
within. As with Shakespeare there is so 
much within, his pages sparkle like the hea- 
vens at cloudless midnight. The gravity of 
the problem, the reach of the thinking that is 
brought to bear upon it, the logical compact- 
ness of the reasoning, the idiomatic raciness 
of the diction, which flows into poetic rhythm 
as naturally 'as the breath from a musical 
throat into melody, — ■ all this, with the insight 
gained into Hamlet's core, makes us reread 
" To be or not to be," and believe that even in 
Shakespeare we shall meet with no page more 
perfect. 

The intellectual current, so deep yet so 
rapid, so clear yet*so full, that streams through 
Shakespeare's tragedies, binding into indisso- 
luble interdependence all the parts of the 
gorgeous region it traverses, in Hamlet winds 
so sinuously that, like the bends in the great 
Miss'issippi, the current at times seems run- 
ning counter to its own course. But with the 
severe unity of design there is so rich a com- 



HAMLET. l8l 

plexity of meaning, managed with such art and 
riding on such buoyant mental floods, that we 
are never provoked to complain of irrelevancy 
or undramatic delays. Who would like to read 
Hamlet shorn of the advice to the players ? 
The super-excellence of every scene, and the 
immense soul-momentum ^at projects the 
whole into being, carry you forward ever 
swiftly over this and other seeming anoma- 
lies. The glow of genius, at whitest heat, fuses 
the outwardly heterogeneous mass into one 
splendent orb of beauty and power. 

After the deep drafts upon his inmost in 
writing the soliloquies and the more impas- 
sioned dialogues, how welcome must have been 
to Shakespeare the writing down of the advice 
to the players, — welcome as relaxation after 
strenuous work, and welcome as an opportu- 
nity to put forth practical precepts on an art 
of which he was master. 

"Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pro- 
nounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue." 
In the word trippingly there is a wide and a 
subtle significance. To the writer as well as 
to the declaimer of sentences the best advice 
is involved in this one word. The nimbleness 
and lightness enjoined by the word trippingly 



1 8 2 SHAKESPEARE. 

imply a full control of mind over material. In 
the best acting, as in the best writing, the 
words, however brilliant and weighty, are sec- 
ondary, mere tools of the mind, a transparent 
vehicle, a medium through which the spirit is 
to shine. He who is intensely possessed by 
the spirit, the thought, the sentiment, will fix 
and hold the attention and charm the faculties 
of reader or auditor. In the dull writer the 
material is not enough informed with soul : in- 
stead of his being intensely possessed by the 
spirit, by the thought, the mere robe of spirit 
and thought overlaps him, smothers him. The 
reason why Shakespeare is the least dull and 
the most captivating of writers is because his 
words are interpenetrated, vivified, electrified 
by thought and feeling. His life-work was to 
put into words the va^ and various movements 
of his mighty mind. As in acting his own 
Ghost he did not "mouth" his words, that is, 
make them too corporeal and heavy, so in writ- 
ing the Ghost, as in all the pages he wrote, 
he showed the body subservient to the spirit, 
ennobled, glorified by the spirit. 

At the end of the advice to the players, hav- 
ing in a princely style got rid of them and like- 
wise of Polonius, Rosencrantz, and Guilden- 
stern, he calls Horatio. 



HAMLET. 183 

WliaLua..hfljasi^_Hamk^ The 

Ghost takes the initiative ; he gives the tragic 
impulse to his son. But the son, without such 
a friend as this unselfish rational Horatio, 
could not have gone forward. " Benetted round 
with villanies," pressed by a solemn charge, a 
charge too bloody for his tender scrupulous 
nature, but for Horatio he would have rushed 
away from the haunts of men, or laid violent 
hands on himself. Through his love for Ho- 
ratio, and Horatio's full worthiness of his love 
and his confidence, he is saved from despair, 
his hope rewarmed with a new life. To Ho- 
ratio Hamlet says : 

" Horatio, thou art e'en as just a man 
As e'er my conversation coped withal." 

What a eulogy ! The cardinal virtue is Justice : 
unsustained by justice even love and piety 
waste their substance. Justice ties the most 
necessary bond among men. Without some 
justice, much justice, society could not hold 
together; and when justice shall have become 
universally supreme, we shall have reached 
the millennium, — but not till then. 

In his sorest need a greater blessing could 
not have been granted to Hamlet than just 
such a friend, in whom — his character being 



1 84 SHAKESPEARE, 

founded on justice — the distressed Prince 
could put absolute trust, a man who has been 

" As one, in suffering all, that suffers nothing, 
A man, that fortune's buffets and rewards 
Hast ta'en with equal thanks : and bless'd are those, 
Whose blood and judgment are so well co-mingled, 
That they are not a pipe for -fortune's finger 
To sound what stop she please. ,Give me that man, 
That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him 
In my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart, . 
As I do thee." 

And without this dear new warmth in it, his 
heart would have broken. A man, even when 
in straits, shuns making another man the con- 
fident of his criminal aims ; but to one incapa- 
ble of harboring such aims, like Hamlet, with 
his sympathies and heart-hungers, such a friend 
at a time of such a trial was a better self. 

The play, as Hamlet purposed that it should, 
" catches the conscience of the king." It does 
something else : it proves to Hamlet that the 
Ghost is truthful. It should do still more : it 
should help to prove to the reader, that Shake- 
speare believed in the Ghost. Did Shake- 
speare, could he, create what he did not be- 
lieve in } Was he a juggler } Was that 
solemn preparation for the midnight coming 
of the "Majesty of buried Denmark" a mock 



\ HAMLET. 185 

solemnity, to gull the groundlings with a mock 
apparition ? Was Shakespeare one to give to 
a sham such power as the Ghost wields ? Even 
if we could conceive that the man, Shakespeare, 
was capable of such trifling with himself and 
his readers, the artist, Shakespeare, was not 
capable of it. He would not and could not 
make a ghost the moving spring of his deepest 
tragedy, had he not himself believed in the 
possible influence and intervention of spirits 
out of the body in the doings of spirits still in 
the body. Remember that Shakespeare (and it 
is his highest claim to honor and veneration) 
is an apostle of truth. With inspired vision 
he seized the truth in man, in nature, in the 
procedure of divine rule. With Socrates, he 
knew that the essential man is, not the visible 
incarnation, but the invisible spirit. It may 
be that, with Socrates, he personally felt that 
no man was ever truly great without celestial 
inspiration. 

That there is an all-embracing unity of life, 
an infinite infrangible interchainment among 
all the elements and beings of the universe, is 
a deep ground-fact and principle, which the 
mind must recognize, if it would give food and 
scope to its best desires, its trustiest aspira- 



1 86 SHAKESPEARE. 

tions. Between the clod your foot flattens on 
its path and the farthest star whose light, from 
the immeasurable depths of space, has just 
reached us, the tie is indissoluble. Equally 
indissoluble is that between the worm under 
the clod and the beings whose range is among 
the stars, and whose life is ied by beams to 
which those from Suns are twilight. In this 
vast unity the strongest link, or rather that 
which holds all the links together, is the in- 
effable, invisible life-essence, the creative, spir- 
itual might which causes and permeates all be- 
ing. From Homer to Wordsworth the great 
intuitive poets have been the assertors of the 
intimate bond between the two worlds, the un- 
seen and the seen. Of Homer it has been 
written : 

*' On thy vast horizon Gods and men 
Shame history with the grandeurs of their strife, 
Inbreed delight, wrath, wonder^ love, and ruth, 
And deepen man's outworn fast fading ken 
With teachings of the dear religious truth, 
That Heaven and earth live intermingled life." 

In the universe there is no such thing as 
isolation, as complete solitude. The prisoner 
in lonely dungeon, the most desolate and un- 
friended outcast, the Crusoes on speechless isl- 
ands, — 



HAMLET. 187 

" Think you that these are all alone, 
Because bereft of human gaze ? 
Never was aught but on it shone 
Incessant superhuman blaze. 

" The blindest worm, the proudest throne 
Is ever blest with company : 
Who were an instant left alone, 
That instaiit would he cease to be. 

" And that first death would shake the stars, 
With terror rack creation's face, • 

That sprung were life's eternal bars. 
And God no more was in his place." 

Empyrean supervision is unintermitted for 
aye. By the law of universal unity it must be 
so. Life depends on the unceasing activity of 
the causative, the creative, element, which is 
spiritual potency. Milton says : 

" Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth 
Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep." 

What moved Milton to put into words this 
seemingly extravagant audacious belief.? His 
deep consciousness, which placed him in closer 
relation with the creative mightiness than is 
reached by any but the greatest poets and dis- 
coverers, — an intuitive perception, whereby 
he became prophetically cognizant of that he 
could not yet know. A man is a poet by virtue 



1 88 SHAKESPEARE. 

of his intenser and finer sympathy with life in 
all its forms, and with the generative principle 
whence life springs. To the poet, according 
to his degree, are vouchsafed interior views 
that are revelations. To be a poet, that is, a 
creator, he must be nearer to the world of 
causes, the creative world, the spiritual world. 
Owing to this nearness Milton felt that 

"Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth Unseen." 

Shakespeare, with similar sympathetic instinct, 
was so assured of their presence that, a vivid 
depictor of human life, into his marvelously ac- 
tive scenes he frequently brought them as fel- 
low-participants in human doings. The sleep- 
ing Posthumus in prison he comforts with the 
apparitions of his father, mother, and brothers. 
With what a company of spiritual visitors he 
encircles the couches of Richard and Rich7 
mond, the night before the battle of Bosworth. 
On no account would he miss the opportunity, 
given him by Plutarch, of making the spirit of 
Caesar appear to Brutus on the eve of Philippi. 
In Holinshed's. account of Macbeth there is a 
murdered Banquo, but, half an hour after his 
murder, no bloody apparition of him at a 
banquet, to shake the nerves even of a Mac- 
beth. What a lurid cloud of poetry, shadow- 



- HAMLET. 189 

ing the whole dread picture, are the Witches, 
those grotesque incarnations of the evil possi- 
bilities of man's heart, figures who put on 
human form because they are an offspring of 
foulest human fancies! The Witches repre- 
sent the negative side of humanity in malig- 
•nant activity when, under sway of the fiercest 
lusts, it works destructively, and struggles, 
with demoniacal impotency and with momen- 
tary success, to thwart the beneficent product- 
ive bent of man's spiritual motions. To make 
such loathsome hags poetical, what angelic 
sympathy must cooperate with the resources 
of creative might ! 

And Ariel and Caliban ! Only an archbe- 
liever in spiritual beings could have produced 
Ariel. Ariel is a human being relieved of his 
material load, a type of the subtle, the elemen- 
tary intellectual. Caliban is a being in human 
form with the higher human, the moral and 
spiritual, subtracted from him. What an illu- 
minated look into the innermost workshop of 
life there must have darted forth to project 
these two from a human brain. Gifted in 
brightest degree with the higher, the distinctive 
attributes of humanity, Shakespeare's thought 
swept beyond the confines of the concrete and 



1 90 SHAKESPEARE. 

held unconscious converse with the invisible 
potencies, empowered by the Infinite spirit to 
nourish and disenthral mental life. 

Was it at all times entirely unconscious this 
converse ? Shakespeare's gifts were so super- 
lative, his outlook so clear and far, his inlook 
so transcendant, his sensitiveness so exquisite, 
he was so wisely visionary, that, especially in 
his more exalted moods, he may easily have 
felt the influence, almost the contact of guard- 
ian spirits. Under this influence he puts Ham- 
let, and that to vital purpose. On his way to 
England, to banishment he believed on account 
of the slaying of Polonius, attended by Rosen- 
crants and Guildenstern, one night, he tells 
Horatio, "in my heart there was a kind of 
fighting that would not let me sleep." Thus 
mysteriously moved to get up, while Rosen- 
crantz and Guildenstern slept he "fingered 
their packet," unsealed the royal commission, 
wherein he finds " an exact command to the 
King of England to strike off his, Hamlet's, 
head the moment he should arrive, no leisure 
bated, no, not to stay the grinding of the axe." 

Biography sparkles with similar cases of un- 
voiced premonition. Shakespeare may have 
had such himself. He may have anticipated 



HAMLET. 191 

the intuitive Kant, the great solid Ideahst, 
who said : — 

"There will come a day, when it will be 
demonstrated that the human soul throughout 
its terrestrial existence lives in a communion, 
actual and indissoluble, with the immaterial 
natures of the world of spirits ; that this world 
acts upon our own, through influences and 
impressions, of which man has no conscious- 
ness to-day, but which he will recognize at 
some future time." 

From Hamlet's bearing towards those 
around him and from the words that issue 
from his mouth, we perceive that Shakespeare 
has bestowed upon him the master-powers of 
the human mind : he is as high in reason as 
he is deep in sensibility. His intellect is as 
quick and nimble as it is profound ; he is pen- 
etrating and versatile, witty and philosophical. 
A thoughtful idealist, — like Shakespeare him- 
self, — Hamlet is surrounded by shallow real- 
ists ; and no one is so shallow as your thorough 
unimaginative realist. Such a man could not 
but be isolated ; he is not quite so much so to- 
day as in the reign of EHzabeth. How sorely 
must Shakespeare at times have felt this isola- 
tion. Not a soul of his contemporaries un- 



192 SHAKESPEARE. 

derstood him. Among his countless profound 
sentences he never uttered a wiser than when 
he makes Hamlet beg his mother to forgive 
him his virtue, and never one dyed in more 
intimate personal experience : 

" Forgive me this my virtue ; 
For in the fatness of these pursy times 
Virtue itself of vice must pardon beg, 
Yea, curb and woo for leave to do him good." 

To depict such a man, richly, superbly en- 
dowed, Shakespeare wrote the play of Hamlet^ 
and wrote it with a degree of personal zest, it 
seems to me, in his work such as he never felt 
while embodying the protagonist of any other 
play. From Hamlet's mouth come more lines 
than from any other two of Shakespeare's 
chief personages ; and lines, carrying what 
thought, what life, what wit, what beauty, what 
wisdom ! From his quality, character, and po- 
sition, Hamlet is grandly, profoundly symbol- 
ical : he represents the boundless capabilities 
of man, his vast sweep of mental faculty, his 
tragic liabilities, his mysterious fatalities. 

Coleridge says that in Hamlet *^we see a 
great, an almost enormous, intellectiial activity, 
and a proportionate aversion to real action 
consequent upon it." What right has any one 



HAMLET. X 193 

to say that Hamlet is not capable of action ? 
That was a pretty energetic action which 
thrust a sword through the arras, hoping to 
strike the king. The getting up of the play 
gave proof of anything but that " the images 
of his fancy are far more vivid than his actual 
perceptions." Hamlet is not placed in circum- 
stances that offer a field for his powers of ac- 
tion. If a Quaker holds his tongue in the com- 
pany of profane swearers, would you on that 
account set him down as born dumb 1 Claudius 
and Laertes are the men of action suited to 
"the atmosphere around Hamlet. It is not in 
Hamlet deliberately to slay a man even to 
avenge a father's murder, no, not even when 
under a promise solemnly imposed by that 
father's spirit. Under the spell of this awful 
presence he resolves to revenge his father's 
murder, and he does not, as Coleridge says, 
" lose the power of action in the energy of re- 
solve," but he is potently withheld from action 
by deep scruples. Hamlet has in him too much 
of the milk of humanity in cold blood to com- 
mit a homicide, and he is too pure and noble a 
man for revenge. The paternal Ghost brings 
out more pointedly a virtue there is in Hamlet, 
his inaptitude to expiate -one murder by an- 
13 ' 



1 94 SHAKESPEARE, 

other. To do this was counter to the consti- 
tution of his being. Even the voice of his 
father, sounding from beyond the tomb, had no 
power, and no right, to move him to do violence 
to his sensibility. A man's own reason and 
moral sense are his supreme guides against all 
voices and commands, come from whence they 
will. He lames his manhood if he surrenders 
his moral freedom. The deed Hamlet was 
required by his father's spirit to do was a vile 
deed. Not to do it, instead of showing defect 
of mental power, proved its very fullness, re- 
vealing not his weakness but his strength. 
The defect is in the deed, not in the doer. 

And thus, instead of Shakespeare depicting, 
as Goethe thinks, "a great deed laid upon a 
soul unequal to the performance of it," it is the 
soul of Hamlet which is too great for the per- 
formance of a bad deed. 

Where there is neither conscience nor fore- 
thought, to kill a man is easy, as we may learn 
every day. The following short paragraph 
was lately read in the newspapers : 

*' Out of the seventy-seven white people 
whose deaths the Standford (Ky.) yournal re- 
corded last year (1878) only fifty-five died nat- 
ural deaths." 



HAMLET. 195 

Does any one suppose that the state of things 
in the region of Standford was bettered by the 
bloody deeds implied in this short but expres- 
sive paragraph ? And we cannot help surmis- 
ing that the " poor Ghost/' when he went back 
at dawn to his " prison house/' would not, for 
the injunction of revenge be so impressively 
laid upon his son, find in any degree softened 
the fierceness of the fires to which he says he 
was doomed during the day. 

It seems to me that the opinions of Goethe 
and Coleridge on the design of Shakespeare in 
writing the drama of Hamlet not only lower 
the protagonist of the tragedy, but also let 
down the great poem itself from its poetic pre- 
eminence. With all deference for the judg- 
ment of such gifted men (and my deference for 
both of them is great) I cannot but think that 
to attribute to Shakespeare a predetermination 
to illustrate, through the embodiment of a 
character, some especial psychological combi- 
nation in the make up of the character, or to 
elucidate the effects of some mastering passion 
or of some social principle, is to mistake Shake- 
speare's mode of procedure, and to ascribe in 
his creative work an undue place to the mere 
understanding. Such a mode of proceeding 



196 SHAKESPEARE. 

may be necessary to dramatists of less mental 
reach and power of feeling. Shakespeare chose 
a subject for tragedy for its passionate capabil- 
ities, and having strong in himself the health- 
iest moral sensibilities, his penetrative plastic 
intellect manipulated his material with such 
masterly artistic skill, that the dramatic result 
was a vivid poem in which the profoundest 
quality is the conspicuous leadership of these 
moral sensibilities, which by divine creative 
will are supreme in man. God did not produce^ 
Napoleon to signalize the evil of a godless am- 
bition. Shakespeare, an inspired man, a God- 
chosen man, did not produce Macbeth to pre- 
sent to the world, for its edification and dis- 
cipline, the dire effects of unscrupulons lust of 
dominion, but to present Macbeth and his as- 
sociates in their individual characteristics and 
their relations to one another, these individual- 
ities and relations being such as to offer rich 
material for an impressive poem. Human ex- 
istence and history, wisely scanned, glow with 
moral lessons. So deep and true was Shake- 
speare's soul, so pure his nature, so warm his 
sympathies, that in his dramas, as in history 
and contemporaneous life, we may read high 
moral lessons clothed in the gorgeous robes of 



HAMLET. 



197 



poetry. But Shakespeare did not write dra- 
matic poems for the purpose of inculcating 
and enforcing these moral lessons. Had he 
done so, I affirm that his dramas, instead of 
being the juicy, palpitating, rounded, glowing, 
electric creations that they are, would have 
been comparatively jejune, tame, angular, and 
unpoetical. 

Shakespeare is so broad and deep in thought, 
in sensibility so strong and clean, in fellow- 
feeling so full and fine, and so luminous in 
presentation, that in the life-like^ personages 
he sets in motion we find, in most of them, the 
predominance of som.e passion or principle, 
just as we do in the tragedies of real life or in 
the epochs of history. But to impute to him 
the studious purpose of writing a drama to ex- 
hibit the effects of this predominance of pas- 
sion or principle, is to lower the poet to the 
monotonous level of the didactic doctrinaire. 
This were to give to prosaic subjectivity an 
initiative fatal to inspiration, as blasting to the 
bloom of poetry as untimely frost to the buds 
of spring. In Art as in life the moral lesson 
is latent, and on that very account the more 
effective. The discovery of design, of precon- 
ceived idea, has been, I cannot but think, car- 



198 SHAKESPEARE. 

ried much too far. The notion of an idea being 
by Shakespeare intended to rule his plays is 
a prosaic notion, and can therefore throw no 
light on the wondrous products of his art. 

That it was Shakespeare's purpose to exhibit 
in Hamlet a one-sided man with a disabling 
preponderance of ideal thoughtfulness, I can- 
not perceive, and did I perceive it, I should 
think the less of Hamlet as a poetic concre- 
tion. Hamlet was one-sided ; who is not .-* 
Shakespeare himself, the "myriad-minded," 
had, even a;s poet, his weak side, according to 
Coleridge, who thinks he was too thoughtful 
for narrative poetry. Certainly in the roll 
of men he would be registered as a man of 
thought. Burleigh and Walsingham were men 
of action. What Shakespeare could do as a 
man of action is shown by the records of the 
Globe theatre, where he early became not only 
a leading proprietor, but the owner of all 
the "properties," an ownership which implies 
steady practical talent. When he began — 
and he began early — to put aside some of the 
pecuniary fruits of his genius, he proved him- 
self a match for shrewd money-investers. Who 
can say but that, had he not been called to 
move in a still higher sphere, he might have 



HAMLET. 199 

done the duties of Burleigh or Walsingham 
more efficiently than they did them, well as 
they did their work ? And their work was 
well done in proportion as their path was prec- 
edently illuminated by thought, aye, by ideal 
thought. But neither of them could have put 
a hand to his great work. We have seen, al- 
most in our own day, the poet Goethe chief 
minister of the Duchy of Weimar, giving evi- 
dence of rare administrative ability in diverse 
departments, — ability which he never would 
have been believed to possess, had not the 
Duke of Weimar discerned his worth and su- 
periority as a man of action. But for the 
Duke's sagacity this part of Goethe's inherent 
power would have lain dormant. That in 
Hamlet was latent a vigorous clear-headed man 
of action is proved by the slaying of Polonius, 
by the practical scheme of the detective play, 
by his quick substitution, in the royal commis- 
sion, of the names of Rosencrantz and Guilden- 
stern for his own name in self-defense at sea, 
on the way to England, where he expected to 
arrive with them, by his choice of such a friend 
as Horatio, ty his conduct as well as his words 
in the last scene. 

A man with Hamlet's mental force and en- 



20O SHAKESPEARE, 

dowment is conscious of the presence in him 
of motions which, if uncurbed, would bring 
quick ruin to all around him. Such a onie, un- 
mastered by conscience and noble sympathies, 
might become a devouring scourge like Mac- 
beth. Hamlet is not held before us by Shake- 
speare as an ideal perfection, by no means ; 
but among his defects is neither a shallow 
willfulness nor an incapable dreaminess, and 
among his virtues is a profound tender scrupu- 
lousness. A man of this caliber and quality 
will not be so easy to understand as one of 
less complex composition. The momentum of 
weighty faculties, under the impulsion of swel- 
ling eagerness, will project his thought, anci 
even his action, so much beyond the common 
range, that he will seem eccentric and danger- 
ous. To others, aye, and to himself, his con- 
duct will at times appear to contradict his 
character. Hence, Hamlet appears mysterious, 
enigmatical. This is not the fault of Shake- 
speare. Far was he from such an artistic 
blunder as designedly to present him as unin- 
telligible. He endowed Hamlet with his own 
best and deepest, with a profoiind suscepti- 
bility coupled with an intellect of large grasp 
and keenest edge, with an omnivorous mental 



HAMLBT, 201 

hunger, —an equipment rare in its fullness 
and fineness. Your cold man is not at all 
mysterious; mystery begins and grows with 
warmth. Where the whole brain is involved 
in productive heat, the mystery deepens ; and 
when a man with such- a brain, aglow with as- 
piration and thought, is suddenly thrown upon 
a conjunction caused by grossest guiltiness, he 
irresistibly recoils. Afront of the lurid fires 
of crime his noble glow is quenched, as the 
sun is by eclipse, by the interposition of part 
of the earth itself. Hamlet has the thought 
and sympathy and will to be a broad benefactor 
to his kind, but the unexpected glare of most 
damnable guilt daunts him. It is not that he 
is too weak for the occasion ; he is too high 
to reach down to it. After the revelation of 
his uncle's double criminality, and his father's 
ghostly cry for revenge, he is forced to ex- 
claim : 

" The time is out of joint : O cursed spite, 
That ever I was born to set it right ! " 

Because, with a deep despondent sigh, he feels 
that this is not his sphere, he is not on that 
account an incapable dreamer, a laggart, a 
mere metaphysical talker ; only he has no vo- 
cation to right the murder of one king by the 
murder of another. 



202 SHAKESPEARE. 

Of this unique drama, this supreme poem, 
where, throughout an unparalleled diversity of 
impassioned scenes, the marriage of poetry 
and thought gives birth to a crowded offspring 
of sentences, paragraphs, dialogues, soliloquies, 
all aflame with truth and beauty, — of this 
choice literary enchantment, the most exquis- 
ite constituents, as art, the deepest as nature, 
are the brief scenes that Ophelia irradiates 
with her madness : 

" Thought and affliction, passion, hell itself, 
She turns to favor and to prettiness." 

Under the spell of these touching scenes our 
admiration of Shakespeare reaches its climax. 
Here his sympathy and love for humanity 
glisten with their tenderest light. His cre- 
ative insight reveals a dear maiden's faculties 
all jangled and untuned, out of which his 
human feelings and his heavenly art draw a 
melody that startles while it enchants us. 

And now the impassioned lines converge 
towards a point for the catastrophe, in their 
convergence enclosing, like the wide seine of 
the fisherman, many nimble glittering liVes to 
be in a few moments dimmed and stiffened in 
death, the bloody devices of treachery clutch- 
ing the traitors themselves and quickly hurling 



HAMLET. 



203 



them with their victim into the grave they had 
dug for him, the catastrophe being true to life, 
where we often behold the innocent included 
in the immolation of the guilty, even when 
they are not so near to their doings as Hamlet 
was to his associates. Are we not always near 
to the depraved and the wicked, so near that 
we can not escape some responsibility for their 
acts ? so near that we are exposed to the ef- 
fects of their lives and deeds, whether these 
effects show themselves in the tainting of the 
atmosphere we and our children breathe, or in 
the engulphing of the innocent into the fatal 
whirlpool of crime ? 

The catastrophe rushes into its sudden all- 
embracing whirl by the accidental exchanging 
of rapiers between Laertes and Hamlet, that 
is, by chance. Who can say what is chance ? 
Who can say, there is any chance } When in 
the carrying out of our plans there occurs 
something undesigned by ourselves, something 
unexpected, which we call a chance, and which 
diverts the whole scheme from the channel we 
had prepared for it into another, who can say, 
because the incident or movement, which thus 
thwarted us, was not anticipated by us, that it 
was fortuitous, that it could be so, to the de- 



204 SHAKESPEARE. 

signer of us and our being, to the all-designer, 
the all-enfolder ? Has not every visible mate- 
rial fact, must it not have, an invisible spirit- 
ual soul or cause, whether the visible fact be 
the fall of a sparrow or the fall of an empire ? 
A healthy mind, a mind of tolerable fullness 
of endowment, cannot conceive of a fact or an 
act without a cause. Who shall say that this 
or that fact comes from nowhere ? 

The cords that hold our physical life run 
into nervous threads so fine that there needs 
an armed eye to distinguish them ; and into 
how much finer filaments these run, in order 
to bind to themselves the causal spiritual forces 
that rule them, we can only approximately 
conjecture. The solar beams, that illuminate 
and nourish our earthly life, — only visible 
when through an aperture they shine upon 
floating atoms, — are yet of such power that, 
were they withdrawn, our earthly life would 
instantly shrivel and quickly cease. These in- 
visible material beams, that command our phys- 
ical being, are gross in comparison with the 
spiritual beams that command our psychical 
being. In a scene like this fearful catastrophe 
of Hamlet the seemingly accidental circum- 
stance which swiftly produces it, is one end of 



HAMLET. 205 

a long thread whose other end is in the abound- 
ing mysterious realm of causes, the prolific 
spiritual source of all being, and which, thence 
projected to sweep from the earth a whole fam- 
ily by a violent shock, is in perfect harmony 
with the laws of cause and effect as with those 
of love and justice. A Shakespeare is more 
than other men in sympathy with overruling 
spiritual power. 

Dealing, as a tragic poet, with the warmest, 
deepest passions and inward motions of man, 
with the most momentous problems of human 
life, a quickening sensibility to the moral law, 
an. intuitive perception of divine methods, was 
a primary need in Shakespeare's poetic equip- 
ment ; and, more to his superiority here than 
to any other of his superiorities is it due, that 
he towers above his contemporaries. Hence, 
concordant with moral justice is his poetic 
justice. 

At last the wicked king lies stretched in 
death, struck by the hand of Hamlet, not im- 
mediately directed by the vengeful injunction 
of his father's spirit. The royal criminal is 
caught in the deadly trap he set for Hamlet, 
who, warned by the dicing repentant Laertes, 
pierces the wretch with the unbated envenomed 



206 SHAKESPEARE. 

foil, and makes him drink of the poisoned bowl 
set there for Hamlet himself. Poetic justice 
is done to the Queen. Though not privy to 
the murder of her husband, she was indirectly 
participant in it through her criminal inter- 
course with his brother. Peculiarly appropriate 
it is that she should die by her own act, igno- 
rantly committed through her close proximity 
to the miscreant king. The executive art of 
Shakespeare is nowhere more conspicuously 
exhibited than in the catastrophe of this mag- 
nificent drama. 

That the groundwork of the plot is laid by 
the revelation of a spirit, a spirit come from 
the transearthly home of spirits to make the 
revelation, imparts to this drama a unique mys- 
terious grandeur. In presence of every genu- 
ine catastrophe (genuine because in harmony 
with divine judgments and methods), as in 
presence of every earthly catastrophe, and in- 
deed of every human event, these words of 
Shakespeare shine as an indelible inscription 
on the gloom : 

" There 's a divinity that shapes our ends, 
Rough-hew them how we will." 

These profound words issue from the mouth 
of Hamlet in the fifth act, as if on this drama, 



HAMLET, 207 

with its calamitous events and wofully tragic 
end, they were inscribed with more than usual 
distinctness ; and thus inscribed, because the 
whole procedure of the play is ruled by a reve- 
lation from beyond the grave, — a revelation of 
crime which would not otherwise have been 
known, and being thus made known to the 
earth-inhabiting son of the revealer, influenced 
his thought and action from the beginning to 
the end. 

In the whole human being, in body and in 
soul, every movement, every impulse, every 
act, voluntary or involuntary, in its beginning, 
growth and consequences, is subject to law, to 
law ever active and inexorable, — law from 
which, in its multiform activity, there is no es- 
cape, no more than there is from the air you 
breathe. And above all other law ranges and 
reigns spiritual law. 

Thus, it seems to me, that the Ghost, who 
sets the drama in motion, gives to it a peculiar 
significance. He unveils, and is he not pur- 
posely designed by Shakespeare to unveil, the 
influence of spirits out of the flesh on spirits 
in the flesh, and thence their interest and 
agency in earthly doings. That the play of 
Hamlet is a commentary on human life even 



208 SHAKESPEARE. 

more intellectual, sympathetic, profound, poet- 
ical, spiritual, than Shakespeare's other great 
commentaries, is it not due to the ghostly ele- 
ment in it, a deep, true, powerful element, 
which fed and heightened the inspiration of its 
transcendent author ? 

Transcendent I call him, because, in the 
higher capabilities of humanity, he exceeds 
most poets and thinkers, but especially be- 
cause, in the completeness of his mental array, 
in the swarming fullness, ingrained with the 
fine quality of his literary endowment, he ex- 
cells all men. 

His were the master-powers of the mind; 
the supreme Reason, that sits in easy dignity 
on the throne of judgment, upon whose su- 
premacy depend the success of life and the 
validity of artistic interpretation of life, the 
broad keen intellectual potency that ranges 
over and penetrates into all existence, grasp- 
ing the deepest relations among things, feel- 
ings, and thoughts, the ultimate tribunal in 
human doings and thinkings, from whose sen- 
tence there is no wholesome appeal ; joined to 
this the large Emotional Sensibilities, so large, 
that, looking beyond the self, they embrace the 
widest, deepest, warmest interests of mankind, 



. HAMLET. 209 

SO far-stretching that their bearings are univer- 
sal, and yet so intimately involved in every 
man's daily conduct, tending ever to purify it, 
that, without their activity, the jurisdiction of 
the supreme magistrate, Reason, would be cir- 
cumscribed, his high function maimed ; and 
with these sovereign agencies, that one that 
gives to each its finest edge, that endows each 
with perspicuous vision, illuminating each and 
all with so divine a light, that Heaven, earth, 
and man glisten in the glow of the beautiful. 
These three predominating human faculties, or, 
properly, sheaves of faculties, were, in their 
fullest breadth and wakefulness, the rich dower 
of Shakespeare. In order that in the boundless 
field of his poetic movement every want be in- 
stantly supplied, every emergency quickly and 
aptly met, gorgeously were these sovereignties 
attended by thronging trains of ministers, reg- 
istrars, assistants, subordinates. All the Loves 
were there, their tender eyes ready to be 
flooded by tears or to sparkle with smiles ; all 
the passions, their eager glances softened by 
hope or fierce with defiance, some bounding 
through blossoms towards sunlit goals, others 
only visible by the glare of their tiger-eyes, as 
they crouch in the dark, watching to make a 
14 



210 SHAKESPEARE. 

tragic spring. Wit stood ready, armed with 
his polished blades, and a greater than he, 
Humor, not only giving more elastic step to 
individual passages and persons, but enclosing 
the whole work of the master in a buoyant at- 
mosphere of divine tolerance. 

And all this multiform power was enjoyed 
by the possessor with such vivacity of con- 
sciousness, with such intensity of belief, that 
his mind, overflowing in its opulence, grew 
plastic, creative, projecting itself with such a 
gush of light that, like a first dawn break- 
ing into full day, it revealed a new world of 
grandeur and beauty, so braced and graced 
with humanity, that when we survey and recall 
the vivid multitudinous offspring of this one 
brain, we stand dazzled, amazed, enraptured, 
in presence of the resplendent majesty of 
Shakespeare. 



ON FIRST SEEING, IN CENTRAL PARK, THE STATUE 
OF SHAKESPEARE, BY WARD. 

On an early Autumn day, 

With sunny shadows bright, 
Warmed was I in a new ray, 

Awed by the sudden might 

Of a great presence, as I stood. 

Flushed into fullest mood, 

Before the mightiness 
Of Shakespeare, springing 
From beamy shaft, and bringing 

Deep admiration's joy, to bless 
The thankful gazer's eye 
With his dear majesty. 

In a hushed gladness. 

In love and tender sadness, 

We looked, almost with reverence bent, 
As there his image sprang, 

In beautiful embodiment. 
From a fit pedestal, 

As though the Muses nine, all musical, 
At its creation's feat together sang 

When it uprose into the air, 
A living form of strength and grace. 
Crowned with that thoughtful face, 

And holy head so fair 



212 SHAKESPEARE, 

Vaulted and swol'n by tides of urgent deeps 

From earth and heaven and man, 
Itself a central depth, wherein there leaps 

A life that can 
Feed hungering humanity ; 

Men, women, children, grouped to see 
Each other kindled (part unconsciously) 

By this refulgent efifigy 
Of a perennial splendor, 
Nature a brimful lender 
Of glory and of light, 
To consecrate a power, a delight, 
A triumph aye to feeling, thought, and sense, 
A boon given by heavenly art, 
Through sympathy of heart. 
And made to bloom in ever-fresh magnificence. 



LBJl'i9 



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